More on Marc

More on Marc

Marc Fortin's own research relates to how plant cells and viruses interact. "Why does that interaction lead to disease sometimes and why is there an absence of disease other times?"

In recent years, it was thought that the answers were almost in hand.

"For many years, the scientists in my field searched for the resistant genes [in plants that combat viruses]. Now they've been identified and we were all hyped up to solve the mystery."

But it didn't turn out that way. Knowing the genes involved isn't the same thing as knowing how the process plays itself out. The mystery endures.

"So we decided to start looking at it from a different angle," Fortin says of his lab. Instead of examining how the plants resist viruses, Fortin is looking at how the viruses attack the plants.

Viruses are parasites. They rely on their hosts' molecular biological processes in order to replicate because they can't do the job for themselves.

Viruses shut down the transcription mechanism in a plant cell "in order to hijack it for a short while," says Fortin. The virus reprograms the cell to start producing new versions of itself, "then it lets the plant cell recover. If the plant cell dies, the virus hasn't succeeded."

Fortin notes that viruses have "very compact genomes. There is very little extra genetic material. It pretty much carries only what's need to hijack the plant cells."

If Fortin succeeds in determining how the virus/plant cell interaction occurs, he says the results probably wouldn't be used to deal with crop catastrophes.

Those cases are already being well attended to because the impact of the viruses is so obvious. Prince Edward Island farmers are careful to use virus free seed for their potato crops, for instance, because they're well aware of the dangers that viruses pose to their crops

"The most problematic cases are the ones we don't see because they do not cause catastrophes," says Fortin. "Cases where 10 to 20 per cent of a crop's yield is robbed each year without killing the crop.

"The best you can hope for in terms of increasing yield each year is two or three per cent. If we could restore 10 or 20 per cent of a crop affected by a virus, that would be a tremendous improvement in yield."

D.M.