Requirement of cauliflower mosaic virus open reading frame VI product for viral gene expression and multiplication in turnip protoplasts

Cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV) open reading frame (ORF) VI product (P6) has been shown to be the major constituent of viral inclusion body, to function as a post-transcriptional transactivator, and to be essential for infectivity on whole plants. Although these findings suggest that P6 has an important role in viral multiplication, it is unknown whether P6 is required for viral multiplication in a single cell. To address this question, we transfected turnip protoplasts with an ORF VI frame-shift (4 bp deletion) mutant (pCaFS6) of an infectious CaMV DNA clone (pCa122). The mutant was uninfectious. Co-transfection of plasmids expressing P6 complemented the mutant. Overexpression of P6 elevated the infection rate in co-transfection experiments with either pCa122 or pCaFS6. This would have been achieved by elevating the level of pregenomic 35S RNA, a putative polycistronic mRNA for ORFs I, II, III, IV and V, and by enhancing the accumulation of these five viral gene products. When CaMV ORFs I, II, III, TV and V were expressed from monocistronic constructs in which each of the ORFs was placed just downstream of the 35S promoter, the accumulation of ORF III, IV and V products depended an the co-expression of P6. The accumulation of ORF I and II products was not detected, even in the presence of P6. These results suggest that P6 is involved in the stabilization of other viral gene products as well as in the activation of viral gene expression, and thus, is a prerequisite for CaMV multiplication.