How Plant Tips Stay Virus-Free, and What it Means for Future Plant Health Research
Plants are able to keep growing indefinitely because they have tissues made of meristems — plant stem cells — that have the unique ability to transform themselves into the various specialized cells that make up the plant, dividing whenever appropriate and producing new cells of whatever type as needed. Meristems exist at the tips of all plants, allowing them to grow new stems or new roots, and, in trees, also in the trunk, where they add extra girth.
It has been known since the 1950s that the meristems at the tips of plants, or shoot apical meristems (SAM), have the remarkable ability to remain virus-free as they give birth to their specialized daughter cells, even if the rest of the plant is thoroughly infected by a virus. This happens not just for one or even a few viruses, but a very wide range of them.
This virus-beating ability in perhaps the most important part of a plant has been exploited by scientists and farmers since then in order to cultivate new plants from donor plants that are infected, but without passing on the virus. They simply snip a tiny part of the tip, raise it for a time in a test tube or petri dish, and repeat it several times, the plant cutting typically grows pathogen-free.
Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) have offered new insights into this incredible ability in a new study published in Science magazine.
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