What Developmental Biologists Can Learn from Plant Pathogens

Several good friends of mine study disease resistance in plants, and I have loosely followed the enormous advances made in this area. Still, for a long time, I could not get very excited about plant-pathogen interactions. This paper from the Carrington group finally made me realize that even a dyed-in-the-wool developmental biologist like myself must pay closer attention to the field. I was at first surprised to see a pathogen paper published in Developmental Cell, even though I remembered that plant viruses sometimes induced rather bizarre developmental abnormalities. In this paper, the Carrington group revealed that such defects were because of collateral damage caused by a viral protein that blocks an antiviral gene silencing pathway. Since this pathway involves small RNAs, the viral protein inadvertently also interferes with microRNAs important for development. Viral suppressor proteins have since become important tools for dissecting the role of small RNAs in plant development and physiology.Linking a Viral Protein to Plant MicroRNA Function and DevelopmentJim Carrington discusses how his group came to examine the connection between plant RNA viruses and endogenous microRNA processing and function and where subsequent work has taken the field