Studies on plant viruses are biased towards crop diseases and little is known about viruses in natural vegetation. We conducted extensive surveys of plant viruses in wild Brassicaceae plants occurring in three local plant communities in central Japan. We applied RNA-Seq with selective depletion of rRNA, which allowed us to detect infections of all genome-reported viruses simultaneously. Infections of Turnip mosaic virus (TuMV), Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV), Brassica yellows virus, Pelargonium zonate spot virus, and Arabidopsis halleri partitivirus 1 were detected from the two perennial species, Arabidopsis halleri subsp. gemmifera and Rorippa indica. De novo assembly further detected partial sequences of a putative novel virus in Arabis fragellosa. Virus species composition and infection rate differed depending on site and plant species. Viruses were most frequently detected from the perennial clonal plant, A. halleri, in which a high clonal transmission rate of viruses across multiple years was confirmed. Phylogenetic analysis of TuMV and CMV showed that virus strains from wild Brassicaceae were included as a major clade of these viruses with other reported strains from crop plants, suggesting that viruses were shared among wild plants and crops. Our studies indicated that distribution of viruses in natural plant populations are determined by the combinations of life histories of viruses and hosts. Revealing viral distribution in the natural plant communities improves our knowledge on the ecology of plant viruses.
Keywords: Asymptomatic infection; Brassicaceae; Plant communities; Plant viruses; RNA-Seq; Viral ecology.