Parasitic Cuscuta plant attacks a sugar beet plantVIRGINIA TECH COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND LIFE SCIENCES Parasitic plants make connections with other plants’ stems, reaping the benefits of their hosts’ water and nutrient supplies. Nucleic acids, proteins, and metabolites can also be passed through these connections, made by a specialized organ of the parasite called a haustorium. Jim Westwood of Virginia Tech and his colleagues had previously found that tens of different messenger RNAs (mRNAs) from a host tomato plant can move to the parasitic plant, Cuscuta pentagona.
But the extent of the shuffling of RNAs from host to parasite has not been fully appreciated. In a study published today (August 14) in Science, Westwood’s team shows that thousands of different mRNAs are exchanged from Cuscuta to two of its hosts—the widely studied tomato plant and Arabidopsis thaliana—and vice versa. This is the first example of such a large, two-way transfer of mRNAs between different species.
“The high volume of transcripts being exchanged is surprising,” Consuelo De Moraes, a plant biologist and ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who was not involved in the work, told The Scientist in an e-mail. “The movement and functions of mobile RNAs in plants is a relatively new and exciting topic in plant ...
