Can we vaccinate plants against viruses, as for humans?
Dyears his greenhouses in the experimental field of INRAE in Colmar, the team of the Vaccivine Research Project has, in the last seven years, worked on the short-rughe, disease of decline in the vine, which affects more than 60 % of the French wine surface. The main cause is a virus, the GFLV (Grapevine Fanleaf Virus), transmitted from vine to vines by a nematode, three millimeters who infects the roots when it feeds. Result: vineyards with yellowed leaves, distorted leaves or branches, and clusters, causing up to 100 % loss of yield with premature uprooting of plots.
At INRAE, researchers assess the level of protection against infection in 200 pot vines based on the premunition principle (cross-protection in English). “It is a process thanks to which an attenuated or hypoagressive virus will protect the plant from a more dangerous virus,” explains Olivier Lemaire, research director in the healthy research unit and quality of INRAE COLMAR wine .
It is the American McKinney who is the first to have used, with success, a strain of the mosaic virus of tobacco to protect the plant from an infection by other strains. “A first test in 1929 had shown that pre-to buy a tobacco plant with a strain that did not cause symptoms of tobacco mosaic, we managed to protect the plant from the expression of problematic symptoms to […] Read more