Alternative splicing usually leads to an increase in the number of gene products that can be derived from a single transcript. Here, a different and novel use of alternative splicing--as a means to control the amount of a potentially toxic gene product in the plant pararetrovirus Cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV)--is reported. About 70 % of the CaMV 35S RNA, which serves as a substrate for both r...

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) an agro-economically important food crop in the world, is sensitive to many fungal pathogens including Rhizoctonia solani (AG-3), the causal agent of stem and root rot diseases. Chitinase and glucanase are cell wall degrading enzymes which have been shown to have high antifungal activity against a wide range of phytopathogenic fungi. In the present study, plasmid p...

Appropriate regulation of transcription in higher plants requires specific cis elements in the regulatory regions of genes and their corresponding trans-acting proteins. Analysis of the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV) 35S promoter has contributed to the understanding of transcriptional regulatory mechanisms. The intact 35S promoter confers constitutive expression upon heterologous genes in most...

An improved version of the previously obtained cloning vector pCass was constructed by partially duplicating the 35S promoter used to drive the transient transcription of cloned viral cDNAs. Full-length cDNAs of the three genomic RNAs of tomato aspermy cucumovirus (TAV) cloned in this improved pCass (designated pCass2) gave a 3-fold higher infectivity in two plant species tested than the same c...