Abstract
Agriculture is an indispensable part of every person’s life, ensuring that nutritious and inexpensive food is readily available. As any other organisms, plants are subject to numerous parasitic infections. Biological evolution has allowed plants to produce a variety of toxic compounds to deal with their pathogens. American pokeweed plant (Phytolacca americana) manufactures pokeweed antiviral protein, a ribosome inactivating protein that disrupts protein synthesis and lowers infectivity of many plant and animal viruses. The intricate mechanism of PAP antiviral activity entails a delicate coordination and interplay of several factors, allowing the plant to battle its invaders. Here, we examine the molecular mechanism of this plant peptide, and describe a molecular model of pokeweed’s antiviral activity.
Highlights
Agriculture continues to be confronted by epidemics, having devastating effects on economies and the plant sources essential for human and animal life
Employing a pull-down assay, we showed that pokeweed antiviral protein (PAP) binds to eIFiso4G and eIFiso4E simultaneously, and this was confirmed by fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) [63]
The initial recognition may occur through PAP binding to the cap structure found at the 5ʹ-end of the capped viral genomes, thereby enabling PAP to access its substrates for depurination (Kd for PAP-m7GTP 43.3 ± 0.1 nM at 25°C) [53]
Summary
Agriculture continues to be confronted by epidemics, having devastating effects on economies and the plant sources essential for human and animal life. Recent findings have put forward an interesting mechanism for the translation inhibition by PAP [51], where PAP targets and depurinates capped mRNA directly.
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