This book assembles a comprehensive collection of plant virus electron micrographs of good quality, offers a consistent treatment, and backs the visual data with a consistent and comprehensive text. Although this book is primarily about the structure of virus particles and infected cells, the results of biochemical experiments are referred too when relevant, so that the virus particles described appear as part of a replicating complex. Similarly, infected cells are portrayed as active rather than static structures.

Authored by electron microscopists and leading members of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV), the Atlas of Virus Diagrams includes chapters on virus classification. The diagrams, selected for content and historic and aesthetic value, illustrate vertebrate, invertebrate, and plant bacterial viruses taken from English, French, and German language virological literature. The book presents this information in three sections: Overviews, including vertebrate and plant viruses Viruses with cubic and helical symmetry Viruses with binary symmetry (tailed bacteriophages).

The Purpose of this book is to provide a helpful reference for invertebrate pathologist, virologists, and electron microscopists on invertebrate viruses. Investigators from around the world have shared their expertise in order introduce scientists to the exciting advances in invertebrate virology.

This volume of the series The Plant Viruses is devoted to viruses with rod-shaped particles belonging to the following four groups: the toba moviruses (named after tobacco mosaic virus), the tobraviruses (after to bacco rattle), the hordeiviruses (after the latin hordeum in honor of the type member barley stripe mosaic virus), and the not yet officially rec ognized furoviruses (fungus-transmitted rod-shaped viruses, Shirako and Brakke, 1984). At present these clusters of plant viruses are called groups instead of genera or families as is customary in other areas of virology. This pe culiarity of plant viral taxonomy (Matthews, 1982) is due to the fact that the current Plant Virus Subcommittee of the International Committee of Taxonomy of Viruses is deeply split on what to call the categories or ranks used in virus classification. Some plant virologists believe that the species concept cannot be applied to viruses because this concept, according to them, necessarily involves sexual reproduction and genetic isolation (Milne, 1984; Murant, 1985). This belief no doubt stems from the fact that these authors restrict the use of the term species to biological species. According to them, a collection of similar viral isolates and strains does constitute an individ ual virus, i. e. , it is a taxonomy entity separate from other individual viruses.

This book provides a comprehensive look at the field of plant virus evolution. It is the first book ever published on the topic. Individual chapters, written by experts in the field, cover plant virus ecology, emerging viruses, plant viruses that integrate into the host genome, population biology, evolutionary mechanisms and appropriate methods for analysis. It covers RNA viruses, DNA viruses, pararetroviruses and viroids, and presents a number of thought-provoking ideas.