212 Ebola messages in my mailbox...

[Ulrich Melcher]

Murilo Zerbini wrote (quoting me):

>> There are also some viruses (for
>> example, luteoviruses) that because of their limitation to phloem do not
>> require any movement protein function.
>
>Good point about the luteos. There's a lot that we don't know about plant
>virus movement. Also, it has been shown that some plant viruses use more
>than one movement protein (eg, the bipartite geminiviruses use BR1 to get
>out of the nucleus, and then BL1 to modify plasmodesmata and move
>cell-to-cell). Did you include BR1 in your comparisons ?

No, I did not.  Further, no BR1 proteins were among the top hits when
searching with the 30K superfamily consensus sequences.


>BTW, this has
>nothing to do with Ebola, but did you compare the movement proteins with
>plant proteins ? I'm wondering if you found any similarities that might
>suggest that plant virus movement proteins were originally plant
>proteins.
>
The entire non-redundant protein sequence database was searched by Blast
using the movement protein consensus sequences.  Yes, a few plant proteins
appeared on the list, but nothing strikingly significant.


Ulrich Melcher                 umelcher at bmb-fs1.biochem.okstate.edu
Department of Biochemistry     Tel: 405-744-6210
  and Molecular Biology        FAX: 405-744-7799
Oklahoma State University
Stillwater OK 74078-0454 USA