Following the considerable success of the Plant Virology Protocols in the Methods
in Molecular Biology volume, Humana Press invited us to produce a second edition
of this volume.
The first book Plant Virology Protocols: From Virus Isolation to Transgenic
Resistance had a trend running through it, which people liked, which was – methods
to isolate a virus, clone it, express it, and transform it into plants, and evaluate those
plants for transgenic resistance.
For the second edition, we have decided on a different trend running through the
book that is – From Viral Sequence to Protein Function, which will cover the many
new techniques that we now can apply to analyze and understand plant viruses.
This book has been divided into five major parts, containing 44 chapters in total.
Part 1 provides a general introduction to some typical plant viral proteins, and their
role in infection and interactions with other viral proteins, with the host, vectors, etc.
Part 2 provides a range of techniques for investigating viral nucleic acid
sequence as well functional analysis, with Part 3 covering protein analysis and
investigation of protein function.
Part 4 has a wide-ranging remit but centered on techniques for microscopy/GFP
visualization and analysis/protein tagging/generation of infectious clones and other
such tools.
Part 5 covers the emerging area of genomics, interactions with host factors, and
plant-based studies, a theme that will probably expand over the coming years to
require an entire book dedicated to this theme alone, perhaps Plant Virology
Protocols Vol 3!