bioRxiv · 2026-05-23
Researchers discovered that tiny membrane-wrapped packets naturally secreted by plants can carry complete, infectious geminivirus particles — suggesting these vesicles may be an overlooked route by which the virus spreads through plants and potentially to insect vectors.
Extracellular vesicles isolated from geminivirus-infected plants contained complete viral genomes plus both capsid (shell) and movement proteins — all components needed for infection.
These vesicle fractions were proven infectious: mechanical inoculation onto naive (healthy) plants successfully transmitted the disease.
This represents a newly identified movement pathway beyond the canonical plasmodesmata-based route, potentially relevant to how the virus crosses membrane barriers in insect vector hosts.
