Marilyn Roossinck, Ph.D., wants to learn more about wild plant viruses, a lot more.

A professor in the Plant Biology Division of The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, Roossinck will have the opportunity to perform an in-depth study of wild plant viruses after receiving a $1,126,591 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for her project, Five Thousand Virus Genomes. The grant will assist Roossinck and her team as they return to Costa Rica and research the relatively unknown world of wild plant viruses.

"We know virtually nothing about plant viruses in the wild," Roossinck said. "The vast majority of knowledge we possess about viruses comes from our study of domesticated plants and animals. I am grateful to the NSF and the USDA for their support as we begin to chart the unfamiliar waters of wild plant viruses."

Roossinck's study is based in the wildlands of Costa Rica because of its extensive plant diversity. Roossinck said the small Central American country possesses more than 4 percent of the earth's plant species and has more plant variations than the continental United States.

Roossinck will return to Costa Rica this month. Her team will work to discover and catalog as many wild plant viruses as possible, sequence the virus' RNA with Bruce Roe, Ph.D., Professor of Biochemistry from the University of Oklahoma (OU), and develop bioinformatic tools to analyze the wealth of data with another OU collaborator, Jonathan Wren, Ph.D., Assistant Professor.

The data collected throughout the project will be deposited in an internationally-accessible database, which is also being created as part of the NSF/USDA grant.

"If a scientist encounters a new type of virus in a crop, they can go to this database and find information about what the virus is and how it works," she said. "It will be a great resource."

Another of Roossinck's objectives with the Five Thousand Virus Genomes project is to compare the wild viruses with domesticated varieties that appear in the local agriculture. By analyzing this relationship, she hopes to uncover how viruses move through the environment.

"From our preliminary work in Costa Rica, we found a virus that appeared in a nearby crop plant," Roossinck said. "We want to determine if the viruses are moving from crops to wildlands or from wildlands to crops. This can answer the important ecological questions about how human interaction affects the world around us. Are we impacting the wildlands or vice versa?"

In addition to the scientific benefits, Roossinck's project will incorporate her 12-week summer undergraduate training program, which involves interns from Oklahoma and across the United States. Undergraduate honor students will also be directly involved in the virus RNA sequencing portion of the project.

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Photo:

Marilyn Roossinck

News Release Issued: October 18, 2006

The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, Inc. (www.noble.org), headquartered in Ardmore, Okla., is a nonprofit organization conducting agricultural, forage improvement and plant biology research; assisting farmers and ranchers through educational and consultative agricultural programs; and providing grants to nonprofit charitable, educational and health organizations.