Analysis of RNA role in spreading disease advances study of damaging plant ...(case of some loops. It looks like al...)

It looks like all 27 loops are important, but we need to know which ones are important for the RNAs ability to reproduce itself in the cell, and which ones are important for spreading from one part of the plant to another, Zhong said. And we know we can find similar structures in different RNAs, so that means that what we learned can be applied to other types of RNA.

So far, the researchers have discovered that a change to almost any loop will slow or eliminate replication, except for one loop. In that case, when disrupted, it instead causes an increase in RNA duplication. A few loops also were identified that are required for movement of the viroid from one part of the plant to another, which spreads the infection.

We still dont know exactly where a particular mutant fails to spread because there are so many cell layers in the plant. We still need to take a look at each mutant to see where the infection starts in the plant and what kind of cell types are affected, Ding said.

He also said that although the viroids themselves dont contain or make proteins, there must be proteins in the plant that are responsible for recognizing the viroid and allowing it to move around.

The viroid mutants that fail to replicate or move around will be valuable materials to help identify these proteins. For example, a protein that recognizes a viroid structure that is required for movement between cell layers would not be expected to bind to the viroid if the structure is mutated to abolish the movement. This also means that mutating the RNA might not be the only bioengineering target. Instead, proteins could be key to designing plants that will not succumb to viroid infection.

Once you pinpoint a protein, you might be able to change the protein function so it cannot recognize the viroid and allow it to spread, said Ding, whose lab is developing methods to look for all of the proteins that bind to viroids to pr
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