Coassembly of Tobacco Mosaic Virus Coat Proteins into Nanotubes with Uniform Length and Improved Physical Stability

Using tobacco mosaic virus coat proteins (TMVcp) from both sources of the plant and bacterial expression systems as building blocks, we demonstrate here a coassembly strategy of TMV nanotubes in the presence of RNA. Specifically, plant-expressed cp (cp(p)) efficiently dominates the genomic RNA encapsidation to determine the length of assembled TMV nanotubes, whereas the incorporated Escherichia coli-expressed cp (cp(ec)) improves the physical stability of TMV nanotubes by introducing disulfide bonds between the interfaces of subunits. We expect this coassembly strategy can be expanded to other virus nanomaterials to obtain desired properties based on rationally designed protein-RNA and protein-protein interfacial interactions.