Identification and study of tobacco mosaic virus movement function by complementation tests.

The phenomenon of trans-complementation of cell-to-cell movement between plant positive-strand RNA viruses is discussed with an emphasis on tobamoviruses. Attention is focused on complementation between tobamoviruses (coding for a single movement protein, MP) and two groups of viruses that contain the triple block of MP genes and require four (potato virus X) or three (barley stripe mosaic virus) proteins for cell-to-cell movement. The highlights of complementation data obtained by different experimental approaches are given, including (i) double infections with movement-deficient (dependent) and helper viruses; (ii) infections with recombinant viral genomes bearing a heterologous MP gene; (iii) complementation of a movement-deficient virus in transgenic plants expressing the MP of a helper virus; and (iv) co-bombardment of plant tissues with the cDNAs of a movement-dependent virus genome and the MP gene of a helper virus.