Scottish Crop Research Institute, Invergowrie, Dundee, UK.
Abstracts of the papers presented at the International Conference of Indian Virological Society on “Emerging and Re-emerging viral Diseases of the Tropics and Subtropics” at Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, India, December 11–14, 2007.
Transgenic plants expressing viral sequences have been deployed for resistance to plant viruses for 20 years. Nevertheless, concerns have been raised about potential risks associated with the use of viral-resistant transgenic plants and also the use of viral sequences in transgenic plants to express foreign genes, in that such sequences may lead to recombination between heterologous viruses and viral transgene sequences. In addition, concerns have been raised about the use of plant viruses as gene expression vectors for overproduction of proteins in plants. These issues have led to questions such as will novel viruses be created by recombination? Will such hybrid viruses be more pathogenic? Will these novel viruses have increased host ranges? Are recombinant viruses stable? Will they outcompete the parental viruses? Does the use of the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV) 35S RNA promoter affect the stability of the transgene after infection by CaMV? Does the use of the CaMV 35S RNA promoter facilitate integration of CaMV into plant genomes? Does CaMV integration affect the expression of the transgene? These issues have now been examined in several laboratories and the situation occurring in various transgenic plants has been compared to what occurs in non-transgenic plants after infection by viruses, as a baseline for recombination. This presentation will summarize the data obtained from several such studies and will answer the above questions based on these research findings.
