WITH the help of some tomato and tobacco plants and a narcotic weed, two botanists in Britain have discovered a cunning trick by which plants defeat viruses. The finding may help explain why genes that have been engineered into plants don't always work properly.
David Baulcombe and Andrew Hamilton of the John Innes Centre in Norwich have shown that plants protect themselves by sabotaging any foreign genes smuggled into the plant. They do this by making tiny stretches of "spoiler" RNA that gum up RNA copies of the foreign genes.
Earlier experiments had suggested that plants might defend themselves by making RNA molecules that sabotage the production of viral proteins. To make proteins, a cell first creates RNA copies of a gene, which are "read" by the protein-making machinery. But if a plant can make a short segment of RNA that binds to the viral RNA and gums it up, ...
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