Projects

Project funding: Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS)

The proposed research will shed light on aspects of plant virus epidemiology that have been overlooked until now, thus we strongly believe that the project will generate breakthrough findings with important relevance for the field. We will provide and use strategies for implementing plant virus metagenomics to understand plant virus cycling dynamics in natural and managed ecosystems. As an example, the release of plant viruses into environment through wastewater, representing the virus discharge from urban and agricultural environment, will be evaluated as potential route of spread of plant viruses to new areas. This is especially relevant since treated wastewater (or wastewaterrecipient river water) is being increasingly used for irrigation of crop plants, and could help solving some unresolved questions behind the rapid spread of some of the recently emerging environmentally persistent plant viruses. Improved understanding of possible fluxes of plant viruses and improved surveillance strategies have the potential for anticipating and preventing spread of plant viruses and for early detection before the occurrence of significant outbreaks in economically important crops, caused by new viruses that spilled over from e.g., wild plant species.  

The outcomes of the proposed project will generate a wealth of novel information about virus diversity in wild plant species. The discovery of known viruses for the first time in wild plants and expected discovery of many new viruses in such plants will provide important genomic resources for the future studies in plant virology and will accelerate the discovery of the same viruses also in other host plant species. It is expected that the virome research of the aquatic plants within this project will bring especially novel data since they are currently particularly understudied from plant virology perspective. The outcomes of the proposed research on aquatic plants will provide basic methodological improvements by establishing an experimental system and novel insights into understudied virome of aquatic plants. This will likely open new lines of research about the presence, biology and transmission mechanisms of viruses in aquatic plants.  

Apart from genomic information about virus diversity also biological relevance of plant viromes from wild plants and environmental samples (water) will be evaluated. Possible impact that viruses found in one environment can have on hosts in other environment will be identified in inoculation experiments and the links between different environments or between different species within or between the environments will be estimated using network analysis. This will bring a new knowledge about the biological characteristics of an array of known and new viruses, which will at the same time improve the understanding of the biology of plant viruses and also feed future risk assessments for particular viral species.