Engineering Selective Autophagy for Virus Elimination in Cassava

Wilmer Cuellar of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia seeks to modify the autophagy pathway in plants, which is the mechanism that organisms use to sequester and degrade damaged proteins, to instead target and destroy proteins of pathogenic viruses. This new strategy for virus elimination in plants will first be tested in cassava, but could be functional in other plant-virus systems as well.