Conference: Plant Virology Satellite Symposium for 31st Annual Meeting of American Society of Virology, July 21-25, 2012 at the Monona Terrace Convention Center in Madison, WI

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Intellectual Merit: This project is to help support the Plant Virology Satellite Saturday Symposium at the 31st Annual Meeting of the American Society of Virology, which will take place from July 21-25, 2012 at the Monona Terrace Convention Center, Madison, Wisconsin. The Symposium is sponsored by the Plant Virology Club (PVC), an organization within the American Society of Virology that was initiated to support research and speakers at the annual meeting who focus on plant viruses. The PVC sponsors a one day Symposium every other year at the Annual Meeting of the ASV. The Symposium this year was organized by Dr. Anne Simon, the elected Plant Virus Councilor and the PI on this project. Dr. Simon has worked throughout her career to bring together researchers working on plant and animal viruses and to make animal virus researchers more aware of the exciting work that uses plant viruses as models. Most virologists receive their graduate education in Medical Schools, which nearly uniformly ignore research that pertains to plant viruses. Similarly, most students studying plant viruses are educated in plant pathology departments that likewise spend little time on animal viruses. This separation has created a gap in the appreciation of the research currently being conducted using plant viruses by animal virologists working in the same area. This lack of appreciation reduces the impact of the work on model plant viruses and also has resulted in the loss of support (from NIH and USDA) for research that uses model plant viruses. The low level of 'cross-talk' between animal and plant virologists has also retarded research in the broad areas of virus replication/gene expression and RNA structure/function as well as innate immunity. The most prominent example of the negative impact on research that accompanies segregation of viruses according to host is the field of RNA silencing, which was well known to exist as a protective mechanism against plant viruses before its belated discovery in nematodes. Conferences that intermix talks on animal and plant viruses are rare (e.g., the Plus-strand RNA Virus meetings every three years), and the vast majority of talks even at these meetings continue to focus on animal viruses. The idea for this year's Satellite Symposium, entitled: Virus Replication and Movement: Building Bridges Between Plant and Animal Viruses came from an issue of Current Opinion in Virology (Nov, 2011), which was edited by Anne Simon and Grant McFadden. This issue was designed around a series of topics that were relevant to both plant and animal virologists, with each topic covered by an animal and a plant virologist. These topics are: Virus replication; Virus translation; Virus origins; Virus reorganization of intracellular membranes; and Virus cell-to-cell movement. The authors, selected as being world leaders in their fields, incorporated information from their counterpart's chapter into their submission, to better tie together the intersecting fields. Dr. Simon's idea was to organize a novel Plant Virology Symposium around each of these topics and invite the authors to speak. All authors gave enthusiastic agreement to come and present their current research, and place this research within the broader disciplines of plant and animal virus research. This should result in a broadening of the appreciation of research fields regardless of the host by audience members and hopefully foster new areas of communication within the broad field of Virology.Broader Impacts: Graduate Students/Postdocs who work on plant/insect/fungal viruses will be eligible for these NSF-sponsored awards. This will assure that the students benefiting are not engaged in human health/related research, which is less appropriate for NSF support. Attention will be paid to distribution of the travel awards to labs in all regions of the US, and preference will be given to students/postdocs who are underrepresented minorities, women and persons with disabilities. We have also arranged with Elsevier to present free copies of the Current Opinion in Virology that this symposium is based on, which should allow participants to immediately access review articles that span animal and plant virology, thus further broadening the educational opportunity. Dr. Simon has spent her career advocating for the broadening of the education of virologists in this country and this symposium is the culmination of these efforts. These travel awards will allow students who might not have been able to attend for financial reasons due to the current funding climate, to participate in this exciting intersection among many fields of virology.