Publication Date:
2014-08-16
Description:
Movement of RNAs between cells of a single plant is well documented, but cross-species RNA transfer is largely unexplored. Cuscuta pentagona (dodder) is a parasitic plant that forms symplastic connections with its hosts and takes up host messenger RNAs (mRNAs). We sequenced transcriptomes of Cuscuta growing on Arabidopsis and tomato hosts to characterize mRNA transfer between species and found that mRNAs move in high numbers and in a bidirectional manner. The mobile transcripts represented thousands of different genes, and nearly half the expressed transcriptome of Arabidopsis was identified in Cuscuta. These findings demonstrate that parasitic plants can exchange large proportions of their transcriptomes with hosts, providing potential mechanisms for RNA-based interactions between species and horizontal gene transfer.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Kim, Gunjune -- LeBlanc, Megan L -- Wafula, Eric K -- dePamphilis, Claude W -- Westwood, James H -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2014 Aug 15;345(6198):808-11. doi: 10.1126/science.1253122.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Plant Pathology, Physiology and Weed Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA. ; Department of Biology and the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. ; Department of Plant Pathology, Physiology and Weed Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA. westwood@vt.edu.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25124438" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Arabidopsis/*genetics/parasitology
;
Cuscuta/*genetics/physiology
;
DNA, Complementary
;
Gene Transfer, Horizontal
;
Genes, Plant
;
Genome, Plant
;
Host-Parasite Interactions
;
Lycopersicon esculentum/*genetics/parasitology
;
RNA, Messenger/*genetics/metabolism
;
RNA, Plant/*genetics/metabolism
;
*Transcriptome
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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