Volume 27, No 3, Mar 2017

ISSN: 1001-0602 
EISSN: 1748-7838 2018 
impact factor 17.848* 
(Clarivate Analytics, 2019)

Volume 27 Issue 3, March 2017: 402-415

ORIGINAL ARTICLES

Viral effector protein manipulates host hormone signaling to attract insect vectors

Dewei Wu^1,*, Tiancong Qi^1,*, Wan-Xiang Li², Haixia Tian³, Hua Gao¹, Jiaojiao Wang¹, Jin Ge⁴, Ruifeng Yao¹, Chunmei Ren³, Xian-Bing Wang⁵, Yule Liu¹, Le Kang⁴, Shou-Wei Ding² and Daoxin Xie¹

¹Tsinghua-Peking Center for Life Sciences, School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
²Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA
³College of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Crop Gene Engineering Key Laboratory of Hunan Province, Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha, Hunan 410128, China
⁴State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management of Pest Insects and Rodents, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
⁵State Key Laboratory of Agro-Biotechnology and Ministry of Agriculture Key Laboratory of Soil Microbiology, College of Biological Sciences, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, China Correspondence: Daoxin Xie, E-mail: daoxinlab@tsinghua.edu.cn; Shou-Wei Ding, E-mail: shou-wei.ding@ucr.edu; Le Kang,(lkang@ioz.ac.cn)

Some plant and animal pathogens can manipulate their hosts to cause them to release odors that are attractive to the pathogens' arthropod vectors. However, the molecular mechanism underlying this process is largely unexplored, and the specific effectors the pathogens employ as well as the pathways within the hosts they target are currently unknown. Here we reveal that the aphid-borne cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) employs its 2b protein, a well-characterized viral suppressor of host RNA interference (VSR), to target the host's jasmonate (JA) hormone pathway, thus acting as a viral inducer of host attractiveness to insect vectors (VIA). 2b inhibits JA signaling by directly interacting with and repressing JA-induced degradation of host jasmonate ZIM-domain proteins, instead of using its VSR activity. Our findings identify a previously defined VSR protein as a VIA and uncover a molecular mechanism CMV uses to manipulate host's attractiveness to insect vectors by targeting host hormone signaling.

10.1038/cr.2017.2

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