Opinion | Even My Strawberry Seedling Has a Virus - The N... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/opinion/coronavirus-pla...

https://nyti.ms/2Tod7NY

Even My Strawberry
Seedling Has a Virus
Plants can get sick, too.

By A. Hope Jahren
Dr. Jahren is a professor of geobiology at the University of Oslo.

May 21, 2020, 5:03 a.m. ET

OSLO — A plant’s leaf is its face. If you are well acquainted with a plant,
you can differentiate hunger from thirst, sickness from hale, vigor from
torpor, all from the look of its leaf. Tomato leaves curl when you
overwater them; sweet potato leaves spot yellow to demand magnesium.
Near my desk sit hundreds of plant faces, and I search them throughout
the day, hoping one will give me a reason to leave my chair.

Back in March, I decided that my homebound spring and summer (and

fall?) would be the perfect time to recreate the abundant garden of my
childhood. Garden seeds are ridiculously cheap: You can fit a lifetime
supply of carrots in the palm of one hand — minus the water, sun and
waiting, of course. Now dozens of egg cartons, one seed per egg well, line
my windowsills and my counters. Old coffee cups act as pots for larger
varieties, and I planted my grandmother’s thimble collection with onion
seeds, just to see if they would take.

By now, many are bursting at the root, but they must stay inside one
more week, until the last of the nighttime chill is gone.

Each morning, I look through my plants to see what they accomplished

during the night. Tiny seedlings labor around the clock to build a scaffold

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that can support two temporary leaves, the cotyledons. Naïvely verdant,
they unfold like my morning newspaper, flimsy and recyclable, making
claims that won’t last.

Only after the first real leaf has emerged, its shape unique to its species,
can I be sure what is what. Sweet pea blades stack like tiddlywinks,
carrots have feathers, and string beans fly papery kites of green.

Yesterday I awoke to find something unusual: One leaf on one strawberry

plant was green on one side and transparently yellow on the other. This
single harlequin leaflet, no bigger than my fingernail, means that my
strawberry seedling has been infected with a virus.

The symptoms are diagnostic, for a virus infects a plant the same way
that a virus infects a human being: It violates the cell and hijacks its
biochemical machinery, then reprograms that machinery into duplicating
the virus while neglecting its normal duties.

In humans, nerve cells infected with Poliovirus stop sending the signals
that cause muscles to move. Plant cells infected withCaulimovirus
neglect their chloroplasts, the solar panels of the cell; they lose their
green pigment, and whole tissues blanch sickly pale as the infection
spreads, downstream within the xylem. As the virus multiplies, more and
more leaves become useless. Making flower, fruit and seed takes a back
seat to simply staying alive, and from a farmer’s perspective, the harvest
is ruined.

Sheltering in place from one virus, I am forced to confront another. I

have many choices in front of me, none of them simple.

I could destroy the infected individual, but strawberries are notoriously

difficult to culture from seed. Months of careful tending have yielded only
four plants, and it’s too late to start over. Furthermore, I’m not convinced

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that the virus will kill my plant, for it otherwise looks healthy — it may
recover, and it may even bear some fruit.

Then again, an aphid could spread the virus from the strawberry to my
radishes and potatoes. All three crops could end in ruin if I don’t act.

Should I take stringent measures and suffer the setback now? Should I
carry on and risk total wreckage later? Or maybe the whole house has
been infected for weeks and it doesn’t matter what I do.

The stakes feel high but they’re not; I will not try to support my family
from my harvest, as many people around the world do. Common corn, for
example, which makes up 30 percent of the annual food supply in sub-
Saharan Africa, is susceptible to a Mastrevirus. It is known as the maize
streak virus because of the pale lines it draws down an infected blade; a
stricken field takes on a wrinkled-corduroy look. The first epidemic was
reported in sub-Saharan Africa in 1901; since then regular outbreaks
have wiped out as much as a third of the region’s total harvest.

We don’t make vaccines for plants, although there is some evidence that
acquiring one viral infection might help defend against others. There is a
cure for the maize streak virus, albeit one that has been rejected by much
of the world. A transgenic variety of corndeveloped in 2007 proved
immune, but bans on genetically modified organisms have placed it out
of reach for most smallholder farmers. With plants, as with people,
governments have a potent say over who is (and isn’t) supplied with the
tools to combat disease.

African farmers employ many other methods when fighting outbreaks,

and they all involve extra work and difficult choices.

The leafhopper — a general name for more than 20,000 species of insects
— spreads the virus from plant to plant. It bites into a stalk, drinks the
sap and moves on to the next. Agricultural distancing minimizes the

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damage, as it increases how far a leafhopper must hop. Different crops

can be planted within and between rows of corn seedlings; fields are also
sprayed with insecticide and weeded meticulously. At the first sign of
infection, sick plants are hacked from the field, along with everything else
growing within a 16-foot radius. Hope is applied and luck is petitioned
and constant vigilance is required.

There is another way of ending a pandemic of maize streak disease, but it

involves letting the virus run its course and, basically, letting the world
burn.

After the infection has played itself out, there still remain hot spots of
health and promise within a field of rotten debris. Just at the tip of the
central growing stem of every plant, there sits a collection of magical cells
that seek the unknown; they are the original stem cells after which all
others are named. The tissue surrounding these cells is sterile and free
from infection of any kind, and can be scraped off and planted to grow a
new, healthy plant. With care and labor, a farmer may collect stem cells
from each of the infected plants and then walk away, burning the virus-
ridden field to the ground behind her.

The burning requires a fire beyond measure, a fire fed with diesel and
kerosene; she must goad the flames throughout one night, and then the
next. Only after the water boils from the dank soil will the infected leaves
burn and obliterate the virus within.

After the smoke clears, the farmer can rebuild her field by coddling the
stem-cell survivors of catastrophe. Re-tilled furrows wait for a sprout to
appear, and a new generation of hungry leafhoppers peek in from the
edges — from their blade-eye perspective, the whole world is beginning
anew. Hope is applied and luck is petitioned, and the rain falls, or it
doesn’t, and the sun shines too little or too much, and constant vigilance

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is required. Two centimeters under the soil, hundreds upon thousands of

corn embryos wait for the signal that tells them it’s time to try again.

I moved my four strawberry plants to the four corners of my house; they

are as distant from one another and from the rest of my seedlings as
possible. During my coffee breaks, I pace from plant to plant, hunting for
aphids too small to see; I search the internet for pictures of infected
leaves, trying to predict the unknowable. I go about my day, trying to
focus on normal things like lunch and laundry. But if I’m honest with
myself, the only thing that I am really doing is waiting.
A. Hope Jahren is a professor of geobiology at the University of Oslo and the author of “The
Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here” and the memoir
“Lab Girl.”

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