Overcoming the Woody Barrier: Dodder Enables Efficient Transfer of Infectious Clones to Woody Plants

Abstract

Woody hosts are notoriously resistant to genetic transformation. Traditional methods, such as Agrobacterium-mediated transformation, are often inefficient, and this limitation extends to delivering infectious clones to woody plants. Dodder species (Cuscuta spp.) are holoparasitic plants that can establish direct connections with the vascular tissue of the parasitized plants, allowing them to facilitate virus transmission between unrelated botanical species. We demonstrated that a novel dodder-based approach achieved superior transmission in Rubus spp. compared to direct agroinoculation. The transmission rates for systemic blackberry chlorotic ringspot virus transmission increased from 9% to 73%, whereas the transmission of the phloem-restricted blackberry yellow vein associated virus rose from 0% to 46%. This novel method expands the toolbox available to plant biologists to study virus-host interactions in woody plants.