COMPARATIVE KINETIC ANALYSIS OF VIRE2 INTRACELLULAR TRAFFICKING

Abstract

This project aims at finding plant endogenous counterparts, by conducting a comparative kinetic analysis, with which VirE2 shares the same motility features. With constructs for respective plant organelles and VirE2 with different fluorescent tags, this study showed that VirE2 and plant cell organelles showed different velocities. Interestingly, the motility characteristics of the transmembrane domain of MyoB (MyoB-TM) were similar to that of VirE2. Therefore, further studies on interaction between them were conducted. However, in the co-expression experiments, majority of MyoB-TM did not co-localize with VirE2. Surprisingly, tumorigenesis assay of root segments showed that mutation in MyoB2 remarkably abolished Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of Arabidopsis, suggesting that MyoB2 may play a critical role in the transformation. However, overexpression of DUF593, the putative myosin-interacting domain of MyoB, the motility of VirE2 did not change much. Thus the connection of MyoB with VirE2 remains to be further elucidated.