Collaborative Research: AToL: ACCESS DNA viruses: A Comprehensive survey of Circular Eukaryotic Single-Stranded DNA viruses in Invertebrates and Fungi

病毒影响所有形式的细胞生命;然而，追踪它们的进化历史极其困难。这个项目将重建病毒生命树的一个未充分研究的分支的进化：环状真核单链DNA（CESS）病毒。 ESS病毒是已知的最小的病毒，但它们包括对全球农业具有破坏性影响的病原体。最近，一般环境采样发现了多种与这些病原体仅有远亲关系的CESS病毒，并表明它们感染的宿主范围比以前认为的更广，包括昆虫和真菌。该项目系统地测试以前未开发的主机，以发现，测序和分类他们的CESS病毒。系统发育分析将确定所有的CESS病毒是如何相互关联的，提供了一个框架，分类的CESS病毒树的生命。更广泛的影响，这项研究包括研究生，本科生和博士后的培训，以及K-12推广和创建基于网络的资源，为科学和公众。中学生将参与收集无脊椎动物样本，这些样本将在研究生和博士后的病毒学培训研讨会上进行处理。项目结果将在一个网站上公布，以增加公众对欧洲环境与安全局病毒的了解，生物信息学工具将与科学界免费分享。

Viruses affect all forms of cellular life; however, it is extremely difficult to trace their evolutionary history. This project will reconstruct the phylogeny of an understudied branch of the viral tree of life: that of circular eukaryotic single-stranded DNA (CESS) viruses. CESS viruses are the smallest known viruses, yet they include pathogens with devastating impacts on agriculture worldwide. Recently, general environmental sampling has uncovered a diversity of CESS viruses that are only distantly related to these pathogens and has shown that they infect a wider range of hosts than previously thought, including insects and fungi. This project systematically tests previously unexplored hosts to discover, sequence, and classify their CESS viruses. Phylogenetic analyses will then determine how all CESS viruses are related to one another, providing a framework for classifying the CESS viral tree of life.Broader impacts of this research include training of graduate students, undergraduates, and postdocs, as well as K-12 outreach and creation of web-based resources for the scientific and general public. Middle school students will be involved in collecting invertebrate samples, which will be processed during a virology training workshop for graduate students and postdocs on CESS virus genomics. Project results will be displayed on a website to increase public knowledge about CESS viruses, and bioinformatics tools will be shared freely with the scientific community.