Focusing on Potato Virus Y

By measuring potato plant light reflectance and color on the ground and from space, we can potentially provide a means to rapidly and easily detect and manage viral outbreaks.”

Peter Nelson

GREATER UNDERSTANDING of the biology of one of the most destructive plant viruses to potato crops will be the focus of a research hub at the University of Maine that is part of a new $6.1 million institute focused on virology and host-virus dynamics.

The National Science Foundation awarded the grant to the University of Arkansas to establish the Host-Virus Evolutionary Dynamics Institute. Hub sites will be located at the University of Maine, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, Ouachita Baptist University and Universidad Interamericana in Puerto Rico.

Scientists will study multiple virus systems across all domains of life — Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya. The goal is to establish fundamental “rules of life,” or laws of virology, that apply to all viruses — or at least large sets of virus systems.

The institute will be led by Ruben Michael Ceballos, assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Arkansas, collaborating with an interdisciplinary team of geneticists, virologists, ecosystem ecologists and mathematicians. The UMaine hub will be led by E. Han Tan, assistant professor of plant genetics.

UMaine will receive more than $446,800 to fund research led by Tan and Peter Nelson, forestry ecology director at the Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park and a faculty associate in UMaine’s School of Forest Resources. Their research team will use hyperspectral and long-read sequencing methods to study Potato Virus Y (PVY), strains of which in Maine and elsewhere can result in severe losses in crop yield. The researchers also will use genomic tools at UMaine’s Maine Center for Genetics in the Environment to study PVY in potatoes.

“Not only will our research test a novel method to detect PVY-infected potato, which costs the potato industry substantial amounts of money for lab testing each year, we hope to better understand the arms race between PVY and potato, which will be integrated with other viral systems under investigation at this institute,” says Tan.

Tan is a co-principal investigator on the NSF Biology Integration Institute grant, along with other hub leaders: Anissa Buckner, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff; Nathan Reyna, Ouachita Baptist University; and Elizabeth Padilla, Universidad Interamericana Aguadilla.