Reconstructing the Mastrevirus communities structure on La Réunion: The
tale of agricultural associated pathogens
Abstract
The geographical distribution and diversity of viruses can differ
between cultivated areas and adjacent natural environments, raising
questions about the interplay between plant diversity and the species
richness and prevalence of the phytoviruses. As both the amplification
and the dilution of viral species richness due to increasing host
diversity have been theorized and observed, a deeper understanding of
how plant-viruses interact in natural environments is needed to explore
how host availability conditions viral diversity and distributions. This
study explores interactions of viruses from the Mastrevirus genus
(family Geminiviridae) with hosts from the Poaceae family across ten
sites from three contrasting ecosystems on La Réunion. Among 273 plant
pools, representing 61 Poales species, 15 Mastrevirus species were
characterized from 22 hosts. We find a strong association of
mastreviruses with hosts from agro-ecosystems and the absence of
mastreviruses in subalpine areas, dominated by native plants. This
suggests that all detected mastreviruses likely originated from viruses
introduced through agricultural activities rather than being native to
La Réunion. Analyses of the structure of the host plant-mastrevirus
interaction network revealed a pattern of increasing viral richness with
increasing host richness. Accounting for variations in the diversity of
hosts across sites, we observed increasing viral niche occupancies with
increasing host species richness. Virus realized richness at any given
site is conditioned on the global capacity of the plant populations to
host diverse mastreviruses. Whether this tendency is driven by synergy
between viruses, or by an interplay between vector population and plant
richness, remains to be established.