Department of Plant Biotechnology, School of Biotechnology, Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai-625021.
Abstracts of Research Papers Presented during the National Symposium of Indian Virological Society at Unit of Plant Virology, Division of Plant Pathology, Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi-110 012, October 14–1.
India is the largest producer of bhendi (okra) in the world. The major constraint to bhendi productio is the bhendi yellow vein mosaic disease (BYVMD) that causes extensive damage to the crop. In our lab we have shown that bhendi yellow vein mosaic disease in India is caused by association of a satellite b DNA molecule with a begomovirus (Jose and Usha, 2003). Pathogen-derived resistance (PDR) is based on teh concept that the transgenic expression of pathogen sequences in the host plants interferes with the life cycle of the pathogen itself. In the present study, we have developed transgenic tobacco plants harboring the coat protein gene, the replicase gene (in both sense and antisense orientations), the AV2 and AC4 open-reading frames (all from DNA A). Work is in progress towards analyzing the role of these sequences in virus infection by agroinfection with the full-length infectious clones of the DNA A and b components, which have been cloned and sequenced in our lab (Accession umbers AF241479 & AJ308425 respectively). In order to qunatify the viral load in the plants using Real Time PCR, we have made primers specific for the virus and have tested their efficacy using the cloned begomovirus component of BYVMD.
