A putative antiviral role of plant cytidine deaminases

Abstract

A mechanism of innate antiviral immunity operating against viruses infecting mammalian cells has been described during the last decade. Host cytidine deaminases (e.g., APOBEC3 proteins) edit viral genomes giving raise to hypermutated nonfunctional viruses; consequently, viral fitness is reduced through lethal mutagenesis. By contrast, sub-lethal hypermutagenesis may contribute to virus evolvability by increasing population diversity. To prevent genome editing, some viruses have evolved proteins that mediate APOBEC3 degradation. The model plant Arabidopsis thaliana encodes for nine cytidine deaminases (AtCDAs), raising the question of whether deamination is an antiviral mechanism in plants as well. Here we tested the effects of AtCDAs expression on the pararetrovirus Cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV). We show that A. thaliana AtCDA1 gene product exerts a mutagenic activity, which indeed generates a negative correlation between the level of AtCDA1 expression and CaMV accumulation in the plant, suggesting that deamination may also work as an antiviral mechanism in plants.