The Tug-of-War between Plants and Viruses: Great Progress and Many Remaining Questions

Abstract

Plants are persistently challenged by various phytopathogens. To protect themselves, plants have evolved multilayered surveillance against all pathogens. For intracellular parasitic viruses, plants have developed innate immunity, RNA silencing, translation repression, ubiquitination-mediated and autophagy-mediated protein degradation, and other dominant resistance gene-mediated defenses. Plant viruses have also acquired diverse strategies to suppress and even exploit host defense machinery to ensure their survival. A better understanding of the defense and counter-defense between plants and viruses will obviously benefit from the development of efficient and broad-spectrum virus resistance for sustainable agriculture. In this review, we summarize the cutting edge of knowledge concerning the defense and counter-defense between plants and viruses, and highlight the unexploited areas that are especially worth investigating in the near future.