The project pursues the following main aims:
- Prepare a set of infectious viral clones for recently discovered plant viruses, providing a foundation for further studies of their biological properties.
- Ascertain the plant associations and host ranges of putative plant viruses discovered through metagenomics in environmental and archaeological samples.
- Gain unprecedented insight into the adaptive constraints acting on a virus recently discovered in a wild plant, as it evolves across different plant hosts.
- Increase understanding of the trade-offs between different components of viral fitness — such as virion stability and replication — for an environmentally stable virus discovered in a wild plant and in the environment.
To deliver on these aims, the project is organised into five work packages (WPs), each building on the results of the ones before it:
WP1 — Preparation of study system(s) and construction of infective viral clones
Selects candidate viruses from recent metagenomic discoveries, validates their genome sequences and builds infectious clones, confirming their infectivity in test plants.
WP2 — Validation of metagenomic discoveries
Multiplies viruses discovered in environmental and archaeological samples and characterises their host range and plant associations.
WP3 — Preparation of mutant libraries for a selected infectious viral clone
Builds deep mutational scanning (DMS) libraries for a wild-plant tobamovirus, generating the diversity of viral variants needed for the experiments in WP4.
WP4 — Experimental evolution to study viral adaptive constraints and trade-offs
Uses the DMS libraries to test how the virus adapts across different host plants and how trade-offs between fitness components (e.g., environmental stability, virulence, replication) shape its evolution.
WP5 — Dissemination and management of project data
Ensures FAIR data management and shares the project’s results.
The diagram below summarises how the five work packages and their tasks connect across the project:
Overview of the SNEP-VIMS project structure. WP = work package; T = task. The acronyms in the lower-left corner of each work package indicate the contributing partners: NIB (National Institute of Biology), CIB-CSIC (Margarita Salas Center for Biological Research, CSIC, Madrid, Spain), I²SysBio (Institute of Integrative Systems Biology, CSIC–Universitat de València, Spain) and Fitó (Semillas Fitó, Barcelona, Spain).