Can some viruses actually help plants?
To the public, viruses may be looked at as a negative when it comes to plant health. Carolyn Malmstrom thinks some viruses could be beneficial to native Michigan crops.
Malmstrom, a professor in the Department of Plant Biology at Michigan State University, studies the switchgrass virome - a collection of viruses - to understand how natural viral symbionts influence plant stress tolerance and local adaptation.
Switchgrass, which is from the same plant family as corn and wheat, is an important low-maintenance native grass that spans across North America.
“We are really interested in exploring some of these wild viruses that are more likely to have some beneficial relationships with their natural hosts and start to understand how they contribute to plant success,” Malmstrom said.
Her lab's research at the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station explores how viruses, alongside other microbes, shape plant resilience across diverse environments.
“As we do more large-scale sequencing of crops and wild plants, we’ll better be able to guess if there’s any impending threats or if it looks like we’ve got a system that’s benign to beneficial,” she said.
Read the original story from MSU's College of Natural Science.
