PLP Spring Seminar Featuring invited grad student guest: May Wang NCSU

March 10, 2025 1:30PM - 2:30PM 1:30-2:30 pm

PSSB A271 Conference Room

Fitness trade-offs or trade-ups? Insights from a meta-analysis and experimental validation in tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV)

Name: May Wang

Major advisor: David Rasmussen

Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology, North Carolina State University

 The range of hosts a given virus can infect is widely presumed to be limited by fitness trade-offs between alternative hosts. These fitness trade-offs may arise naturally due to antagonistic pleiotropy if mutations that increase fitness in one host tend to decrease fitness in alternate hosts. Yet there is also growing recognition that positive pleiotropy may be more common than previously appreciated. Our previous meta-analysis reveals that cases of positive pleiotropy where mutations have beneficial effects in more than one host may be sufficiently common for evolution to resolve many apparent fitness trade-offs between hosts. Positive pleiotropy could provide a genetic mechanism by which selection can overcome fitness trade-offs. Arboviruses are believed to rarely experience fitness trade-offs, as they are vector-transmitted and have high adaptability to multiple host species. However, the mechanistic basis that arboviruses escape host-specific fitness trade-offs remains understudied. Tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) (Orthotospovirus tomatomaculae, family Tospoviridae, order Bunyavirales) is one of the most destructive plant arboviruses in global agriculture. TSWV has an exceptionally broad host range (>1,090 plant species) and is recognized as generalist virus. Given its broad global distribution, genetic variations between TSWV isolates from different geographical regions may be highly distinctive. Thus, TSWV will serve as a good model for studying the relationships between viral genetic background and host range, as well as evaluating the fitness tradeoffs viruses experience when transitioning to alternative hosts. Preliminary findings suggest that the frequent occurrence of positive pleiotropy may allow TSWV to escape fitness trade-offs and adapt simultaneously to multiple hosts by favoring beneficial mutations that incrementally enhance viral fitness across multiple hosts. This implies that host background of TSWV isolates may not significantly influence their virulence or fitness effects on different hosts. While previous studies have examined only a limited number of TSWV genotypes, leaving open the question of whether fitness tradeoffs occur in distinctive TSWV genotypes when transmitted to alternative hosts. My research aims to explore the fitness dynamics of TSWV across different host species and identify the evolutionary factors limiting the host range of TSWV. The results will provide a valuable framework for investigating the evolutionary dynamics of viral pathogens, and will have practical implications for farmers, enabling them to optimize planting strategies for alternative hosts.

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