This project will leverage expertise in soil viromics and root-associated arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi to investigate fungal viruses in Mediterranean grasslands. The UC Davis team will visit Lyon to learn field and laboratory methods for identifying, collecting, and analyzing grassland fungi, including protocols for purifying fungal communities from roots and soil. Both teams will apply these approaches to their local grassland soils, which will be sequenced for the recovery of fungal viruses. The ECL team will then visit Davis to learn bioinformatics approaches for analyzing the sequencing data generated by the project, facilitating collaborative, comparative analyses of the fungal viruses recovered from both countries.
UC PI:
Joanne Emerson
Department of Plant Pathology, UC Davis
France PI:
Christina Hazard
Laboratoire Ampère, École Centrale de Lyon / Université de Lyon