There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
<p class="first" id="d745383e152">Cuscuta species (dodders) are holoparasites that
totally rely on host plants to survive.
Although various mobile proteins have been identified to travel within a plant, whether
and to what extent protein transfer between Cuscuta and host plants remain unclear.
We found that hundreds to more than 1500 proteins were transferred between Cuscuta
and the host plants Arabidopsis and soybean, and hundreds of inter-plant mobile proteins
were even detected in the seeds of Cuscuta and the host soybean. Different hosts bridge-connected
by dodder were also found to exchange hundreds of proteins. Quantitatively, the mobile
proteins represent a few to more than 10% of the proteomes of foreign plants. Using
Arabidopsis plants expressing different reporter proteins, we further showed that
these reporter proteins could travel between plants and, importantly, retained their
activity in the foreign plants. Comparative analysis between the inter-plant mobile
proteins and mRNAs indicated that the majority of mobile proteins were not de novo
synthesized from the translocated mRNAs, but bona fide mobile proteins. We propose
that large-scale inter-plant protein translocation may play an important role in the
interactions between host plants and dodder and even among the dodder bridge-connected
hosts.
</p>