摘要Autophagy is a conserved intracellular degrada-tion process that plays an active role in plant re-sponse to virus infections.Here we report that geminiviruses counteract activated autophagy-mediated antiviral defense in plant cells through the C2 proteins they encode.We found that,in Nicotiana benthamiana plants,tomato leaf curl Yunnan virus(TLCYnV)infection upregulated the transcription levels of autophagy-related genes(ATGs).Overexpression of NbATG5,NbATG7,or NbATG8a in N.benthamiana plants decreased TLCYnV accumulation and attenuated viral symp-toms.Interestingly,transgenic overexpression of NbATG7 promoted the growth of N.benthamiana plants and enhanced plant resistance to TLCYnV.We further revealed that the C2 protein encoded by TLCYnV directly interacted with the ubiquitin-activating domain of ATG7.This interaction com-petitively disrupted the ATG7–ATG8 binding in N.benthamiana and Solanum lycopersicum plants,thereby inhibiting autophagy activity.Fur-thermore,we uncovered that the C2-mediated autophagy inhibition mechanism was conserved in three other geminiviruses.In summary,we dis-covered a novel counter-defensive strategy em-ployed by geminiviruses that enlists their C2 pro-teins as disrupters of ATG7–ATG8 interactions to defeat antiviral autophagy.