Efficient Establishment of Interfamily Heterograft of Nicotiana benthamiana and Arabidopsis thaliana.

The grafting technique has been applied to study systemic signaling in plants, to investigate whether gene action is graft-transmissible and/or gene products such as RNAs and proteins are transported systemically. Here, we describe two protocols, stem grafting and micrografting, for an interfamily heterograft system between Nicotiana benthamiana scion plants and Arabidopsis stock plants for the identification of systemic mobile signals. Since these plants belong to evolutionally distant families and both genome databases are available, this system can be used to identify mobile substances transported from one plant to the other without doubt.