PVEN 2011: Plant Virus Ecology Network
22/04/2011 - Press release
After two workshops in the United States and Italy, it is France (more specifically CIRAD's Montpellier campus) that will be hosting the Plant Virus Ecology Network (PVEN) from 30 May to 1 June 2011, for its annual plant virus ecology workshop.
"The aim of these successive workshops is to bring together two historically only loosely linked communities: plant ecologists and virologists ", explains Philippe Roumagnac, a CIRAD researcher and co-organizer of the event, with Denis Fargette (IRD).
The idea is to lay the foundations for a new discipline: plant virus ecology, enabling the sharing of knowledge of viral infections in cultivated and wild plants (virologists to ecologists) and the ecological consequences of such infections (ecologists to virologists).
Given this aim of "mutual enrichment " and the desire to open up to the South or to temperate countries on the part of CIRAD and IRD, Montpellier was an obvious choice for the PVEN 2011 international workshop.
Almost 80 scientists from 20 countries are expected, including ten African researchers (virologists) specially invited by the organizers. Most of the participants have already contributed to recent major progress in terms of knowledge of:
- plant virus biodiversity
- the ecology of virus emergence
- the ecological role of plant viruses within farming systems
- the mutual influence of ecosystem characteristics on plant virus distribution and evolution
- changes in the virulence of plant viruses.
As Philippe Roumagnac puts it: "more than ever before, we have to study and discuss the consequences of climate change and manmade changes for the viruses affecting natural and cultivated ecosystems ".
- Category: Coming up