Brome mosaic virus RNA replication and transcription

Abstract

Brome mosaic virus (BMV) was first isolated in 1942 from bromegrass (Bromus inermis) and has since been documented to infect several monocot and dicot species studied in the laboratory. The impact of BMV, however, is not so much as a plant pathogen, but as a model for in-depth studies of the infection process of positive-stranded RNA viruses. As such, BMV is responsible for several firsts. (1) BMV was among the first to be translated using a cell-free system (Shih and Kaesberg, 1973), allowing studies of cap-dependent translation. (2) The BMV genome was one of the first RNA viruses for which the entire sequence was determined (Ahlquist et al., 1981, 1984a). (3) BMV was the first plant virus to be regenerated from transcripts derived from infectious cDNAs (Ahlquist and Janda, 1984; Ahlquist et al., 1984b).