Abstract: The invention provides plant and viral promoters that can be used to confer high-level gene expression on transgenic plants. Representative promoters can be isolated from the genome of Australian banana-infecting badnaviruses from cultivars Mysore, Williams and Goldfinger. The invention further provides construct which include the disclosed promoters operatively linked to a coding sequence. Still further provided are a method of expressing the product of a gene in a plant cell, plant cells having DNA constructs within their genomes, and plants comprising the transgenic cells.