So: thank you, anyone who clicked in, and regular visitors. You make it worthwhile!!
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 33,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 8 Film Festivals
It gives me great delight to pass on some news about an old friend: I have co-authored two papers with the Pappus (husband and wife), and have maintained a long association with Hanu as a favoured referee for Archives of Virology; he has gone on to achieve some distinction at Washington State University – and recently to have made a fundamental discovery in plant virology. I thank Eric Sorenson of the Washington State Magazine for sending me this.
Viral alliances overcome plant defenses, according to newly published WSU research
Contact:
Hanu Pappu, professor and chair of plant pathology, Washington State University, 509-335-3752, hrp@wsu.edu
PULLMAN, Wash. – Washington State University researchers have found that viruses will join forces to overcome a plant’s defenses and cause more severe infections.
“These findings have important implications in our ability to control these viruses,” says Hanu Pappu, Sam Smith Distinguished Professor of Plant Virology and chair of WSU’s Department of Plant Pathology. “Mixed infections are quite common in the field, and now we know that viruses in these mixed infections are helping each other at the genetic level to overcome host defenses and possibly lead to the generation of new viruses.”
Pappu publishes his findings in the latest issue of the journal PLOS ONE. Joining him are Ph.D. student Sudeep Bag and Neena Mitter, associate professor at Australia’s University of Queensland.
The researchers focused on iris yellow spot virus and tomato spotted wilt virus after Bag discovered that, when they infect the same plant, they helped each other overcome a plant’s defense response. With Mitter’s help and sophisticated molecular techniques, Bag found both viruses dramatically changed their genetic expression, breaking down the plant’s defenses and leading to more severe disease.
Bag also found that genes from the tomato spotted wilt virus seemed to “aid and abet” iris yellow spot virus as it spread throughout the plant and caused more disease.
Growers should take this phenomenon into account, says Pappu, with broader management tactics that target more than one virus and possible variations.
The research was funded in part by the Specialty Crops Research Initiative of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The paper, “Complementation between Two Tospoviruses Facilitates the Systemic Movement of a Plant Virus Silencing Suppressor in an Otherwise Restrictive Host,” can be found athttp://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0044803.
PS: the Pappus cook REALLY good food – as I discovered in Florida, at Chuck Niblett’s house, back in 1996 or so….
See on Scoop.it – Virology News
This is actually an article in The Economist from 2007 – forwarded to me by a Professor of Philosophy, as it happens, and which has mouldered on my desk lo, these past five years. Thanks David Benatar!
“Whiteflies are pests in every continent that they are found in—and they are found in every continent except Antarctica. They cause damage directly, by consuming plant juices, and indirectly, by spreading viral diseases. But Liu Shusheng, of Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, and his colleagues have found a strain of the species that delivers a double whammy. Not only does it spread diseases, but it is also vastly more successful when it lives on plants infected with the diseases in question [tomato yellow leafcurl and tobacco curly shoot begomoviruses, both ssDNA geminiviruses] than when it subsists on healthy plants.”
This is a fascinating example of just why it is that certain vector-virus-host combinations can lead to success of the vector, and increased spread of the virus. Basically,
“…type B insects lived six times longer on infected plants than uninfected ones, and their population per infected plant might rise as high as 13 times that on an uninfected one”
This means that geminivirus infection of host plants actually gives a survival advantage to the insects which transmit them. Simple if unfortunate!!
See on www.economist.com
I have been at UCT since I came to Cape Town on holiday from Zambia in 1974, and fell in love with the place. I obtained a BSc in Chemistry and Microbiology in 1976, an Hons in Virology in 1977, an MSc in Virology in 1979, and a PhD in the same discipline in 1984. I became a Lecturer in Virology in 1981, and have risen through the ranks to become a Professor in Microbiology (in January 2003). I am also a Founder Member of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IIDMM) based in the Health Sciences Faculty.
