Analysis reveals compromised nuclear transport receptors and nucleoporins in viroid-infected plants, suggesting potential therapeutic targets.
Viroids are a group of infectious noncoding RNAs that cause substantial crop diseases. Previous studies showed that both RNA silencing and plant immunity play defense roles against viroid infection. However, viroids can still achieve successful systemic infection in hosts. The underlying mechanism remains elusive. Through comparing proteomics profiles from mock and infected tomato samples, we unexpectedly observed a systematic reduction of proteins factors involved in nuclear pore complex and nuclear transport receptors. This fortuitous observation was confirmed in subsequent analyses and led us to discover the impaired NPR1 (NONEXPRESSOR OF PATHOGENESIS-RELATED GENES1) nuclear import in infected samples. Transgenically increasing NPR1 expression in tomato plants or exogenously application of salicylic acid analog repressed potato spindle tuber viroid (PSTVd) infection. Altogether, our finding pinpoints the repressed expression of host nuclear transport receptors and nucleoporins as the mechanism limiting the effectiveness of plant defense against viroid, which significantly advances the understanding of plant-pathogen interactions.
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Wang et al. (2025) studied this question.
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