A plant intron enhances the performance of an infectious clone in planta

Although infectious clones are fundamental tools in virology and plant pathology, their efficacy is often reduced by the instability of viral sequences in Escherichia coli. In this study, we constructed an infectious clone of PepMoV (pPepMoV) in a bacterial binary vector (pSNU1); the clone induces symptoms of PepMoV in agroinfiltrated plants. During its modification and maintenance in E. coli, however, the pPepMoV infectious clone was instable in the bacteria. Manipulation of this unstable clone in the bacterial strain DH10B led to the spontaneous formation of a recombined clone with high stability in the bacteria but with reduced infectivity due to an unwanted insertion of an E. coli sequence in the NIa-protease coding region. Replacement of this sequence with a plant intron restored infectivity and maintained plasmid stability. In addition to restoring plasmid growth in both E. coli and Agrobacterium, the presence of the intron in the PepMoV sequence enhanced the accumulation of PepMoV in agroinfiltrated leaves and resulted in symptom induction in upper systemic leaves that was nearly as strong as with PepMoV sap-inoculation. Plant introns have been previously used to stabilize plasmids in E. coli without any effect or with an unexpected lag in symptom development. In contrast, the current results demonstrated the in vivo enhancement of an infectious clone by a plant intron.