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It's not just pollen that drifts through the spring breeze. Just as some human viruses spread with human reproduction, plant viruses can also travel from flower to flower by pollen "hitchhiker". A study published in Nature Communications shows that the number of viruses transmitted through pollen is very high, and human activities may also be contributing to the spread of such viruses.
Tia-Lynn Ashman, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Pittsburgh, and colleagues used genetic sequencing to catalog viruses in wildflower pollen from four different environments : California Prairie, California Coast, an agricultural region in Pennsylvania and the Appalachian Mountains. The research team found 22 known viruses, some of which have serious effects on crops. They also found evidence of the existence of hundreds of viruses that scientists had never seen before.
These findings are consistent with microbiology results, with Amit Levy, a plant virologist at the University of Florida (who was not involved in the study), saying, "There are far more viruses in the world than we think." ”
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The research team also found an interesting correlation. Flowers collected in agricultural areas carry fragments of genomes from more than 100 different viruses, while flowers from the California prairie (where humans are least active in the area studied) carry only about 12 viruses. Flowers in other study areas also had moderate viral diversity. The researchers speculate that if a patch of farmland's plant species tends to homogenize (indicating lower species diversity), it may allow more viruses to inhabit the area, because once a virus has evolved to infect one of the crops, it will find more suitable hosts here.
While this correlation is only a preliminary inference, Levy thinks it makes a lot of sense. Industrial agriculture, for example, is likely to breed plant pathogens. This is because when plants are intensively planted, "there is no 'social' distance between crops." ”
Ashman wondered if bees that farmers regularly farmed (bees introduced to the United States) would also exacerbate the spread of plant viruses in agricultural areas. These bees are less selective about the plants they "patronize" than most native bees, so they are likely to allow the virus to "hitchhiker" between wildflowers and crops.
Hernan Garcia-Ruiz, a virologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the United States who was not involved in the study, said the study caught his attention because the authors also found a large amount of virus in plants that did not appear to be sick.
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But when such microbes spread from wild plants to crops, they may be less friendly. Examples include the sugarcane mosaic virus, a pathogen that can cause serious harm to sugarcane and corn, and lurks in weeds during crop sowing and harvesting. Garcia-Ruiz said, "Once the corn grows, the virus spreads to the corn along with insects. ”
Ashman believes it is crucial to understand the effects of viruses on multiple plants, especially if human activities contribute to the virus's back-and-forth transmission between natural habitats and agricultural areas. This possibility was particularly appealing to her as a scientific conjecture, but it was also chilling.
Written by: Saima May Sidik
Translation: Qiu Yanfei
Reviewer: Wang Yu
Source of introduction: Scientific American
This article is from: China Digital Science and Technology Museum