Grafting the Way

Grafting is an ancient technique used by farmers and gardeners to combine desired attributes of the rootstock with those of the donor plant shoot, or scion. Grafting essentially saved European wine making: when the insect Dactylosphera vitifoliae devastated European grape-wine varieties over the course of the late 1800s and early 1900s, the varieties were saved by grafting them onto resistant rootstocks from the New World. Since then, these rootstocks have been used to maintain the susceptible Old World cultivars. But grafting is also an excellent tool for scientists studying systemic signals traveling between the rootstock and distal parts of the plants, and vice versa. For example, two important studies (Palauqui et al. 1997; Voinnet et al. 1998) used grafting to demonstrate the spreading of RNA silencing in plants. However, it was a subsequent paper (Crete et al. 2001) that followed up on certain inconsistencies in the grafting results that pointed to subtleties important for both experimental design and understanding systemic signaling in plants. RNA silencing (termed posttranscriptional gene silencing in plants, quelling in fungi, and RNA interference in animals) refers to the phenomenon whereby specifi c gene transcript levels are reduced in the presence of a related RNA. From studies of RNA silencing in several systems, much is now known about the mechanisms involved (Matzke 2002; Mlotshwa et al. 2002), but the systemic spreading in plants is still