Metagenomics Approaches Based on Virion-Associated Nucleic Acids (VANA): An Innovative Tool for Assessing Without A Priori Viral Diversity of Plants

Abstract

This chapter describes an efficient approach that combines quality and yield extraction of viral nucleic acids from plants containing high levels of secondary metabolites and a sequence-independent amplification procedure for both the inventory of known plant viruses and the discovery of unknown ones. This approach turns out to be a useful tool for assessing the virome (the genome of all the viruses that inhabit a particular organism) of plants of interest. We here show that this approach enables the identification of a novel Potyvirus member within a single plant already known to be infected by two other Potyvirus species.