Innovative Approaches to Virus Diagnosis and Control

Viral infectious diseases are important threats to all kingdoms of life on our planet. Examples are the common flu or viral infection of potatoes, but also severe pandemics like last year´s Ebola outbreak or the widespread contamination of arable land with cereal or legume-infecting viruses. All these viral diseases threaten our health and existence directly or indirectly by severely restricting our food and water supply. Successful management and control of viral disease depends on early and reliable detection of the viral pathogen. The early and effective identification and detection of viruses allows anticipating the development of the threat and to implement adequate prevention, therapy, disease management and control measures. So far, virus detection methods have been restricted to the “knowns” of causal agents but recently, high throughput sequencing also allows for the detection of “unknowns”.

The scope of this Research Topic is to compile modern virus diagnostic tools / approaches and to highlight effective innovative virus control measures. By inviting participation from scientists active in human-, animal-, insect-, fungal- and plant-virus research we want to stimulate out of the box thinking and help to identify methods and novel avenues of study, which are transferable between different domains of virus research. We want to identify common strategies for multi-kingdom detection of viruses but also highlight the differences that are preventing these multi-target approaches from being commonly adopted. Additionally, we aim to identify control strategies that might be applicable to a whole range of viruses affecting different organisms. We welcome participation in the form of original research articles, reviews, short communications, and method and protocol papers on all aspects of virus diagnosis and virus control. Cross-kingdom comparative manuscripts on virus diagnosis and control are particularly welcome.