Extracellular vesicles associate with infectious geminiviral particles in the apoplast of infected plants.

Abstract

Plant viruses have evolved diverse strategies to facilitate their movement and survival within the host. Among them, geminiviruses co-opt host cellular machinery to replicate and disseminate. Traditionally, viral propagation has been associated with intercellular symplastic trafficking mediated by plasmodesmata and viral movement proteins. However, recent evidence demonstrated that the plant RNA virus turnip mosaic virus (TuMV) components are associated with extracellular vesicles (EVs). EVs are membrane-bound structures secreted to the extracellular space to potentially mediate several plant-pathogen interactions such as cross-kingdom RNA interference or the delivery of stress response proteins. In animals, EVs facilitate viral transmission both within the host and across species, but knowledge about their potential roles in plant viral infection is scarce. In this study, we demonstrate that EVs isolated from geminivirus-infected plants contain complete viral genomes and both capsid and viral movement proteins. Furthermore, these EV fractions were demonstrated to be infectious when mechanically inoculated onto naive plants. This discovery suggests that EVs may serve as alternative carriers for geminivirus components, enabling long-range transport or potentially modulating host immune responses, and highlights geminiviral capacity to transverse membrane boundaries, essential for circulative arbovirus propagation in their insect vectors. Significance StatementViruses are obligate intracellular parasites that shape ecological communities and crucially challenge animal and plant health worldwide. Conversely to animal viruses, plant-infecting viruses rely on plasmodesmata to disseminate through their host and establish systemic infection. Nonetheless, most plant viruses are insect-transmitted whose ecological cycle relies on their insect vector spread. Thus, strategies to cross continuous membrane barriers are essential for their dissemination and may be potentially conserved in plant hosts. Our discovery that infectious viral entities are associated with EVs reveals an alternative pathway for geminiviral movement within plant hosts that could facilitate vector transmission, challenging our long-standing understanding of plant virus biology and expanding the current conception of plant viral pathology.