History of Coat Protein-Mediated Protection

Since the first demonstration by Powell-Abel et al. (1 ) that plants engineered to express the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) coat protein (CP) gene can resist corresponding viral infection, a decade of research on CP-mediated protection (CPMP) has produced transgenic plants resistant to a multitude of different plant viruses. This field rapidly progressed from testing resistance in model plant systems under growth chamber conditions to conducting field trials on agronomically significant crops such as tomato, potato, sugarbeets, melons, cucumber, tobacco, and rice. In addition, this approach to protection has been extended by expression of other viral sequences corresponding to satellite RNAs, antisense transcripts, sense transcripts, defective interfering sequences, nonstructural genes, portions of genes, and mutated genes in transgenic plants.