Viruses (2022) 14 (3 - 649)

Kayvan Etebari, Pauline Lenancker, Kevin S. Powell and Michael J. Furlong (2022)
Transcriptomics reveal several novel viruses from canegrubs (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) in central Queensland, Australia
Viruses 14 (3 - 649)
Abstract: Canegrubs (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) are major pests of sugarcane crops in Australia, but despite long-term and intensive research, no commercially viable biological control agents have been identified. We used the RNA-Seq approach to explore the viriomes of three different species of canegrubs from central Queensland, Australia to identify potential candidates for biological control. We identified six novel RNA viruses, characterized their genomes, and inferred their evolutionary relationships with other closely related viruses. These novel viruses showed similarity to other known members from picornaviruses, benyviruses, sobemoviruses, totiviruses, and reoviruses. The abundance of viral reads varied in these libraries; for example, Dermolepida albohirtum picorna-like virus (9696 nt) was built from 83,894 assembled reads while only 1350 reads mapped to Lepidiota negatoria beny-like virus (6371 nt). Future studies are essential to determine their natural incidence in different life stages of the host, biodiversity, geographical distributions, and potential as biological control agents for these important pests of sugarcane.
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Full text of article
Database assignments for author(s): Kevin S. Powell, Michael J. Furlong

Research topic(s) for pests/diseases/weeds:
biocontrol - natural enemies
Research topic(s) for beneficials or antagonists:
surveys/distribution/isolation

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Pest and/or beneficial records:

Beneficial	Pest/Disease/Weed	Crop/Product	Country	Quarant.
	Lepidiota negatoria	Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum)	Australia (NT+QLD)
	Lepidiota frenchi	Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum)	Australia (NT+QLD)
	Dermolepida albohirtum	Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum)	Australia (NT+QLD)