Plant viral metagenomics uses a primer-free, antibody-free methodology to assess virus diversity infecting plants like crops, insects, and weeds by extracting viral particles from field samples and sequencing the DNA. The sequences are analyzed using bioinformatics tools to construct bipartite and unimodal networks of host-virus interactions. These networks provide information on viral transmission and disease complexes between multiple viruses that could impact crop yields.

1. Plant viromes
and their analysis for seed systems:
Insects
Weeds
Main crop
Field Sampling groups Bioinformatics pipeline
Viral particles
extraction
Library preparation
Sequence analysis
Bipartite adjacency matrix
Bipartite network
Unimodal network: host
Unimodal network: virus
Links:
Plant viral metagenomics is a novel
diagnostic tool for assessing the virus
diversity, this methodology is primer-
free and no virus antibody is required.
The networks were constructed with
two types of nodes, host and plant
viruses. The analysis was done with
igraph1 and bipartite2 packages in R3.
References
1] Csardi et al. 2006. Complex Systems
2] Dormann et al. 2009. Open Ecology
3] R Core team 2018.
Width of link means number of virus interactions
Plant virus metagenomics allows you to detect most viruses infecting a plant. The main goal
of analyzing the virome is to try to avoid the spread of known, unknown or asymptomatic
viruses through seed propagation which often goes unnoticed.
This information could help to reduce the risk of spreading a virus and to avoid interactions
with other viruses which could affect the severity of the disease. The interaction of viruses
can generate disease complexes, and potentially change the level of yield loss.