Title: The effects of temperature on outbreak of a plant viral disease

4:30 pm, November 4, 2020

Venue: N8T11

Introduction of Speaker:

Dr. Sun Liying is a professor of the College of Plant Protection, Northwest A&F University. Dr. Sun received her bachelor’s degree from Inner Mongolia Agricultural University in 1996 and master’s degree from China Agricultural University in 2003. In 2007, she received PhD from Okayama University, Japan. From 2008 to 2013, Dr. Sun worked in Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences. She joined Northwest A&F University in 2014.

Her research interests include studies of virus-host interactions and virus–vector interactions. She has been working on insect/fungal transmitted viruses such as rice black streaked dwarf virus, wheat yellow mosaic virus. Recently, she initiated a new research topic about cross-kingdom virus infections between plant and fungus. The large distinctness of biological characteristics among organisms of different kingdom lays out natural barriers for virus horizontal transfer, but the utilization of modern technologies and human activities has caused for drastic changes of the biological and ecological systems on the earth. These could facilitate the advantageous conditions for the occurrences of cross-kingdom viral infection in the environment. Conceivably, this raises the concern for possible emergence of new animal and agricultural diseases in the future.

Since 2000, her researches have been focused on RNA viruses infecting plants and fungi, and 44 papers have been published in scientific journals, including Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA in 2017, 2019, and 2020. She has been invited to write the fourth edition of the Virus Encyclopedia for “the cross-kingdom virus infection” section. She was invited to be the top editor of the Frontiers in Fungal virus research topic. Currently, she is cross appointed professor of Okayama University (Japan).