The big unknown: plant virus biodiversity

Studies on plant virus biodiversity are in their infancy, but with new technologies we can expect to see more information about novel plant viruses in the near future. The challenge for virus biodiversity work is that viruses do not have any universal coding sequence, such as ribosomal RNAs found in all cellular life. These obstacles are being overcome in clever ways. Understanding what exists in our natural environment will help us to tackle big issues in agriculture, such as disease emergence and the use of beneficial viruses and other microbes.

► Plant viruses have been studied predominantly in the context of crops and disease.
► Looking for novel viruses is difficult because they do not share any significant sequence motifs.
► New methods using deep sequencing are overcoming problems in novel virus discovery.
► Studying virus biodiversity from individual hosts (ecogenomics) provides additional data for ecololgical studies.