plant viruses and movement [WAS Ebola...]

[Ed Rybicki]

> From:          umelcher at BMB-FS1.BIOCHEM.OKSTATE.EDU (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
...> 
> >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.

Eugene Koonin has shown that the "35K proteins" of viruses like 
the Bromoviridae (Koonin EV, Mushegian AR, Ryabov EV, Dolja VV (1991) Diverse Groups of Plant RNA and DNA
Viruses Share Related Movement Proteins That May Possess Chaperone-Like Activity.  J Gen
Virol 72:2895-2903) look as though they have come from plant 
chaperonins like the HSP90 protein.

 ______________________________________________________
 |     Ed Rybicki, PhD      |  ed at molbiol.uct.ac.za   |
 |    Dept Microbiology     | University of Cape Town |
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