The Ustilago maydis virally encoded KP1 killer toxin

Abstract

Some strains of the plant-pathogenic fungus Ustilago maydis secrete toxins (killer toxins) that are lethal to susceptible strains of the same fungus. There are three well-characterized killer toxins in U. maydis-KP1, KP4, and KP6-which are secreted by the P1, P4, and P6 subtypes, respectively. These killer toxins are small polypeptides encoded by segments of an endogenous, persistent double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) virus in each U. maydis subtype. In P4 and P6, the M2 dsRNA segment encodes the toxin. In this work, the KP1 killer toxin was purified for internal amino acid sequence analysis, and P1M2 was identified as the KP1 toxin-encoding segment by sequence analysis of cDNA clones. The KP1 toxin is a monomer with a predicted molecular weight of 13.4 kDa and does not have extensive sequence similarity with other viral anti-fungal toxins. The P1M2 segment is different from the P4 and P6 toxin-encoding dsRNA segments in that the 3' non-coding region of its plus strand has no sequence homology to the 3' ends of the plus strands of P1M1, P4M2, or P6M2.