Here’s how we can look at world’s deadliest crop killers

Washington: With the help of recent advances, we can now take a magnified look at the world’s deadliest crop killers for the first time.
The Luteoviridae are pathogenic plant viruses responsible for major crop losses worldwide. Transmitted by aphids, the viruses infect a wide range of food crops including cereals, legumes, cucurbits, sugar beet, sugarcane, and potato.
Until now researchers were unable to generate the quantities of these viruses needed to study their structures in high resolution.
Now a team of researchers has used recent advances in plant expression technology to generate sufficient quantities of the pathogen to allow more detailed scrutiny with state of the art microscopy techniques.
The method involves infiltrating a type of tobacco plant with the genes necessary to create virus-like particles (VLPs), reported the study published in the journal ‘Structure’.
From the inserted genetic information, the VLPs self-assemble inside the plant host. This technique avoids the need to handle the infectious virus. Using the VLPs extracted from the plants the team from the John Innes Centre and the Astbury Biostructure Laboratory at the University of Leeds could observe the viral structures to high resolution by cryo-electron microscopy.