New results generated within the project enabled to raise the technological level of high throughput sequencing (HTS) use in plant virology and open new horizons for research is several directions. The results of the projects contributed to the establishment of guidelines for both, HTS use for plant virus diagnostics, including definition and establishment of procedure-specific controls (European plant protection organisation standard published) and also for virus characterisation (new version of guidelines published as a direct result of the project). Innovative tools have been developed enabling contamination monitoring in HTS experiments and one of the first implementations of deep learning for virus discovery. A huge amount of new plant virus discoveries within the project certainly represents a step beyond state of the art and also now enable both, opening of new research frontiers studying those viruses, as well as additional discoveries of novel viral agents, which were previously too divergent to be detected. Finally, new perspectives in virus ecology have been elucidated, e.g. by providing for the first time, clear examples on how water viromes can be used to increase the knowledge on plant virus presence and diversity in the ecosystem, which could be further employed for innovative approaches for virus surveillance in environment.
New virus findings, new diagnostic assays, frameworks and decision trees published during the project are being adopted by EU policy bodies such as European plant protection organization (a partner organization in the project) and transferred to the wider EU plant protection laboratories through European reference laboratories. The knowledge and expertise generated within the project on the detection of viruses in environmental water bodies (WP4) has been exploited to implement in Slovenia a nationwide SARS-CoV-2 monitoring in wastewater.
The project outcomes have been disseminated to scientific audience as well as to potential stake holders, through events such as:
- International Advances in plant virology conference in Ljubljana, co-organized by INEXTVIR consortium and the association of applied biologists, where all ESRs were able to present their results to the wider plant virology community.
-The organization of a hybrid round table on “Adoption and impact of high throughput sequencing in plant health: Seed testing, surveillance and certification” with presence of stake holders and experts.
-The organization of a satellite event in the frame of the 12th International congress of plant pathology in August 2023, in Lyon, France, where all INEXTVIR outcomes were presented to the largest gathering of plant pathology related experts and stake holders.
