The preparation of RNA-dependent RNA polymerase complex from virus infected plants

Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) is an icosahedrion plant virus and contains three different single-stranded positive sense genomic RNAs. The very 3' ends of each of the genomic RNAs can fold into a tRNA-like structure. Based on the structural analysis of the 3' tRNA-like structure of the brome mosaic virus (BMV), we superimposed and redrew the 3' tRNA-like structure of CMV. We homogenized virus infected or healthy tobacco leaves with polytron and carried out low speed centrifugation twice and ultra-centrifugation three times to get detergent solubilized membrane bound fractions. We accidentally found that these fractions were enriched with a host-encoded RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) activity. Similar activity could also be found in other plants tested. Alternately, the membrane bound fraction could be simply precipitated by low speed centrifugation (3,000 g) and high speed ultra-centrifugation (40,000 g). The pellet was then suspended in a detergent-containing buffer, after which 25%-55% glycerol gradient fractionation was performed. Activity was tested through the incorporation of [alpha-32P]UTP using endogenous CMV RNAs as templates on each fraction collected. It was found that most of the fractions contained the viral-encoded RNA-dependent RNA polymerase. The products of RdRp reaction were found to have a double-stranded from through further analysis of the RNase protection assay.