Creating an Ally from an Adversary: Genetic Manipulation of Citrus Tristeza

Citrus is one of the major agricultural crops common to Israel and the United States, important in terms of nutrition, foreign exchange, and employment. The economy of both citrus industries have been chronically plagued by diseases caused by Citrus tristeza virus (CTV). The short term solution until virus-resistant plants can be used is the use of mild strain cross-protection. We are custom designing "ideal" protecting viruses to immunize trees against severe isolates of CTV by purposely inoculating existing endangered trees and new plantings to be propagated as infected (protected) citrus budwood. We crossed the substantial technological hurdles necessary to accomplish this task which included developing an infectious cDNA clone which allows in vitro manipulation of the virus and methods to then infect citrus plants. We created a series of hybrids between decline-inducing and mild CTV strains, tested them in protoplasts, and are amplifying them to inoculate citrus trees for evaluation and mapping of disease determinants. We also extended this developed technology to begin engineering transient expression vectors based on CTV as tools for genetic improvement of tree crops, in this case citrus. Because of the long periods between genetic transformation and the ultimate assay of mature tree characteristics, there is a great need for an effective system that allows the expression or suppression of target genes in fruiting plants. Virus-based vectors will greatly expedite progress in citrus genetic improvement. We characterized several components of the virus that provides necessary information for designing virus-based vectors. We characterized the requirements of the 3 ’-nontranslated replication promoter and two 3 ’-ORF subgenomic (sg) mRNA controller elements. We discovered a novel type of 5’-terminal sgRNAs and characterized the cis-acting control element that also functions as a strong promoter of a 3 ’-sgRNA. We showed that the p23 gene controls negative-stranded RNA synthesis and expression of 3 ’ genes. We identified which genes are required for infection of plants, which are host range determinants, and which are not needed for plant infection. We continued the characterization of native dRNA populations and showed the presence of five different classes including class III dRNAs that consists of infectious and self-replicating molecules and class V dRNAs that contain all of the 3 ’ ORFs, along with class IV dRNAs that retain non-contiguous internal sequences. We have constructed and tested in protoplasts a series of expression vectors that will be described in this proposal.