Ava Verhoeven
Many plant biology studies involve Arabidopsis thaliana as model. This model species grows outside in the Netherlands, and offers a unique perspective to study natural variation in different geographical locations.
However, Arabidiopsis thaliana can also contain a latent comovirus (ArLV1), possibly influencing its capacity for stress resilience.
We use ecological, bioinformatic and molecular approaches to asses the variation in stress resilience of our (still growing) Dutch plant collection of more than 1200 sampling locations. We are also very interested in assessing the plants with and without the comovirus to asses the potential for crop protection.