Field testing transgenic cucumber plants that express the CMV coat protein gene

Abstract

The transfer and expression of the gene that encodes the coat protein of plant viruses in plants has been very successful for the development of plants that are protected against subsequent infections by the same or closely related viruses (Powell-Abel et al., 1986; Beachy et al., 1990). We are interested in using coat protein (CP)-mediated protection for the development of plants that are protected against cucumber mosaic virus (CMV), an economically important virus that has an extremely large host range. CMV CP-mediated protection has been demonstrated in tobacco for the related CMV strains CMV-D (Cuozzo et al., 1988) and CMV-C (Quemada et al., 1991). However, the major crop species that need to be protected against CMV infections are those belonging to the family Cucurbitaceae, and for this reason we have transferred the CMV coat protein (cp) gene into cucumber (Chee and Slightom, 1991) and conducted a preliminary field test (Slightom et al., 1990). We report here a continuation of this experiment by conducting a second field test on the R2 progeny of four transgenic cucumber plant lines.