Plant and Agricultural Virology

Plant and agricultural virology is the study of viruses that infect plants. Virus connections with plants frequently lead to growth and yield limiting disease symptoms, ultimately leading to economic losses and continue to pose a threat to food security, especially in the developing world. Because there are no treatments that can be applied to plants in the field to control viral diseases in the same way that fungicides control fungal diseases, viral disease control is mainly achieved through the use of resistant plants or by preventing virus spread between plants.

The plant virology group studies the epidemiology and population dynamics of known viruses, as well as the discovery of new plant viruses and implementation of appropriate diagnostic tools for their detection. The most effective methods for plant virus eradication are in vitro techniques. In vitro thermotherapy-based methods, such as combining thermotherapy with shoot tip culture, chemotherapy, micrografting, or shoot tip cryotherapy, have been successfully established for the efficient eradication of various viruses from nearly all of the most economically important crops. Recent improvements in DNA sequencing technologies have enabled a paradigm shift in the discovering of novel plant virus variety, as well as changing existing ideas about viral evolution and interactions with their hosts.