New focus on emerging viral diseases

November 09, 2021

A new Horizon 2020 project is underway to address viral diseases responsible for major crop losses in tomatoes and cucurbits in Europe and beyond. Called ‘VIRTIGATION – Emerging viral diseases in tomatoes and cucurbits: Implementation of mitigation strategies for durable disease management’, the project includes INRAE, one of ENDURE’s French partners, Germany’s Julius Kühn Institute (JKI) and Wageningen University (WU) and Stichting Wageningen Research (WR) from the Netherlands.

VIRTIGATION is running for four years (2021 to 2025) and is being coordinated by the Laboratory for Tropical Crop Improvement at the Department of Biosystems of KU Leuven (Belgium). In particular, it is seeking to develop short, medium and long-term solutions to whitefly-transmitted begomoviruses and mechanically transmitted tobamoviruses in tomato and cucurbit crops.

The project reports: “Every year, viral diseases wreak havoc on tomato and cucurbit crops worldwide, destroying in Europe alone billions of EUR in harvest. The EU-funded VIRTIGATION project is on a mission to combat this viral crop destruction and safeguard tomatoes and cucurbits.

“Viral diseases are not only affecting European fields and greenhouses: across the globe, from Morocco, Israel to India, tomatoes and cucurbits are vital staple crops that are under threat. Colossal losses in harvests have been reported, ranging from 15% to entire crop destruction. As the world needs to increase its food production by at least half by 2050 to feed a growing population, mitigating the devastating impact of plant diseases is essential to ensure sufficient food supply, both in quantity and quality.”

VIRTIGATION has set itself six specific objectives:

• Knowledge sharing and engagement of stakeholders in research activities
• Develop robust diagnostic tests, quarantine measures and identify ecological factors driving disease outbreaks
• Understand plant-virus-vector interactions
• Develop IPM solutions
• Identify and pyramid natural resistance to viral diseases and vectors
• Train the tomato and cucurbit value chains

INRAE will be involved in the research on viral genome sequencing and monitoring virus outbreaks, plant-virus-vector interactions and the spread of emerging viral diseases under climate change, and will also be the National Knowledge Broker for France in the project’s multi-actor approach.

JKI is the National Knowledge Broker for Germany and will mainly be involved in the “research on plant-virus-vector interactions and integrated virus and vector management, where it is exploring viral symptom determinants of ToBRFV (Tomato brown rugose fruit virus) to support the search for virus isolates that could be used in cross-protection strategies”.

WU will be contributing to the research on plant-virus-vector interactions and the spread of emerging viral diseases under climate change, with a focus on tomato-geminivirus-whitefly interactions, and finding tomato genes for resistance to ToBRFV.

WR’s departments of Plant Breeding and Biointeractions & Plant Health are contributing to all the project’s research work packages, “with a particular focus on virus epidemiology and ecology, as well as virus and vector control through breeding and Integrated Pest Management (IPM)”. WR is also the National Knowledge Broker for the Netherlands.

For more information:

• Visit the VIRTIGATION website

Last update: 23/12/2021 – ENDURE © 2009 –