ZJU scientists establish the world’s first Geminiviridae-Plant-Insect database

Prof. ZHOU Xueping and Prof. LI Fei from the Zhejiang University College of Agriculture and Biotechnology led their team to publish their latest work on the world’s first Geminiviridae-Plant-Insect database (GPIBase) in the journal Molecular Plant on February 21. This database serves as a vast reservoir containing comprehensive information about geminivirus genes, plant hosts, insect vectors, and virus-plant-insect interactions. It also provides a wide range of online tools such as literature updates in an accessible and user-friendly way.

GPIBase homepage

As one of the most widespread and destructive families of plant viruses, Geminiviridae, named for the twinned icosahedral particles of virus members in the family, poses a severe menace to agricultural production worldwide. Transmitted by various homopterans insects such as whiteflies, leafhoppers, aphids, and treehoppers, geminiviruses infect many major economic crops, such as cotton, tomato, tobacco, cassava, vegetables and fruits, thus incurring considerable losses around the globe.

GPIBase is comprised of five major modules: 1) “Browse”, including the search engine and download of comprehensive information about geminiviruses, plant hosts and insect vectors; 2) “Network”—a visualized network of geminiviruses, plant hosts, and insect vectors; 3) “Phylogeny”, a phylogenetic tree based on whole genome alignment; 4) “Tools”, including BLAST, which can be used for searching the genome or gene alignment against the database of virus genomes; and 5) “Literature”, including 155 main researchers in the geminivirus field for the purpose of promoting cooperation within the geminivirus community and a timely update of geminivirus-related publications.

As a comprehensive, open data repository, GPIBase provides an efficient and convenient platform for the geminivirus community to conduct relevant research.