Efficient Establishment of Interfamily Heterograft of Nicotiana benthamiana and Arabidopsis thaliana.

The grafting technique has been applied to study systemic signaling in plants, especially to investigate whether gene action is graft transmissible and/or gene products such as RNAs and proteins are transported systemically. Here we describe an interfamily heterograft system between Nicotiana benthamiana scion plants and Arabidopsis stock plants for the identification of systemic phloem-mobile signals. Since these plants belong to evolutionary distant families and genome databases are available for both, we can reliably identify mobile substances transported from one to the other plant.