OH 43210 Research in my laboratory is to understand intercellular communication in plants. In particular, we focus on questions of how plasmodesmata and the phloem traffic proteins, nucleic acids, viruses, and viroids. We use these movement proteins as biological probes to investigate how plasmodesmata and the phloem mediate protein trafficking during plant development.
Viroids are small pathogenic RNAs that infect many economically important crops.
Viroid genomes range in size from 246 to 399 nucleotides. Although they do not encode any proteins, viroids replicate autonomously and traffic systemically throughout their hosts. This is in sharp contrast to viruses which encode proteins that interact with a host plant to accomplish functions ranging from replication to systemic movement. The simplicity of a viroid genome and the fact that this RNA genome must interact directly with its host components to accomplish various functions for infection make viroid infection a unique and attractive model system with which to investigate biological processes such as RNA trafficking in a plant. With the experimental systems and tools we have developed, we can now address these fundamental issues in a highly integrated manner.