Procedures for Plant Rhabdovirus Purification, Polyribosome Isolation, and Replicase Extraction

The Rhabdoviridae family consists of a large number of nonsegmented negative-strand RNA viruses. As a group, the rhabdoviruses cause many serious plant and animal diseases that have detrimental effects on agricultural productivity, public health, and wildlife populations. The members of the family collectively have an unusually broad host range composed of viruses that infect both plants and animals (1 ). Many of these viruses are persistently transmitted to their mammalian and plant hosts by insect or arthropod vectors in which they are able to multiply. Consequently, these members of the family may have been able to expand their evolutionary diversity by use of their vectors as intermediate hosts to bridge the boundaries between the animal and plant taxa. Other rhabdoviruses are known to infect fish and aquatic invertebrates, and probably are transmitted via contaminated water.