Fig. 2

Schematic of the TRV-III construct and sequence alignments of the six fragments used for building the TRV-III construct with corresponding targeted regions of group III members. a Schematic of the TRV-III construct. Six E2 gene fragments were linked by overlap extension PCR and cloned into the TRV2 vector. 2X35S: duplicated 35 S promoters; CP: coat protein of TRV; NOSt: nopaline synthase terminator. The numbers 9, 10, 11, 39, 12 and 30: gene fragment from NbUBC9, 10, 11, 39, 12 and 30, respectively. b Sequence alignments of each of the six fragments used for building the TRV-III construct with corresponding targeted fragments of group III members. The fragments from NbUBC12 and NbUBC30 were designed to silence NbUBC12 and NbUBC30, respectively; the DNA fragment from NbUBC9 was designed to silence NbUBC8, 9 and 38; the DNA fragment from NbUBC10 was designed to silence NbUBC10, 28 and 31; the fragment from NbUBC11 to silence NbUBC11 and NbUBC29; and the fragment from NbUBC39 to silence NbUBC39 and NbUBC40. Sequences in the FASTA format were entered into MultAlin and aligned using the default parameters [59]. Color black denotes high consensus nucleotide while red denotes low and neutral consensus nucleotide. The upper Arabic numerals designate the positions of nucleotides