🔎 Curious about how viruses manipulate plants to cause disease? Check out our latest paper in PLOS Pathogens 🦠 🌱

journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

🌾 Impact on plant health: In our study, we unveil an interesting paradox – when plants lack both eIF4E1 and eIFiso4G1, they exhibit remarkably severe disease symptoms upon TuMV infection. And yet, the virus load in these plants is astonishingly low! Why? 🌱🤔

While such host translation hijacking is known in animal viruses like picornaviruses, this is the FIRST report of a plant virus inducing the degradation of a translation initiation factor 4G! 🌱🧬

In our quantitative proteomics analysis, we uncovered a surprising revelation: the abundance of translation initiation factors eIFiso4G1 and eIFiso4G2 greatly decreases when TuMV takes over the plant in the absence of eIF4E1 🌟📚

Polysome profiling and puromycin incorporation revealed the secrets of TuMV's success – an overall decrease in host translation! But how could eIF4E1 protect the host translation machinery? 🧐

However, rather surprisingly, knocking out eIF4E1 doesn't stop TuMV in Arabidopsis. It actually gives TuMV a boost! 🤯 see our previously published paper in Molecular Plant Pathology on that story

https://bsppjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/mpp.13031

Dive into our latest study in @PLOS Pathogens where we reveal hidden strategies for the subversion of host translation by the potyvirus TuMV in Arabidopsis

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1011417

A Blue 🧵