Understanding plant virus biodiversity and impacts on hosts in extreme habitats

Knowledge of species diversity is necessary for both conservation of wild habitats and preservation of ecosystem services. Advancements in sequencing technology are accelerating biodiversity science at a phenomenal rate, enabling rapid progress in understanding relationships within and among species, patterns of distribution, responses of organisms to environmental change, and species evolution. This explosion of information is driven by the discovery of universal coding sequences for Eukaryotes and Prokaryotes that enable rapid categorization of all cellular life based on interspecific and intraspecific variation in conserved genomic regions. However, this focus has ignored organisms, like viruses, that are ubiquitous in all habitats, but which do not have a core set of conserved sequences to expedite profiling and characterization. As a result, our understanding of the diversity of viruses relative to their hosts is extremely limited, even though such knowledge is essential for understanding the ecology of the host organisms and emergence of infectious diseases. To address this issue, we studied the diversity and prevalence of plant viruses in arid Southwest nature preserves using techniques for enrichment of virus genetic material and next-generation deep sequencing.