A Review Paper on Mycoviruses

Abstract

Mycoviruses are very significant viruses, which are found to be infecting fungi. These Mycoviruses require the living cells of their hosts for replicate like the plant and animal viruses. The genome of Mycoviruses mostly consist of double stranded RNA (dsRNA) and least of Mycoviruses genome consist of positive, single stranded RNA (-ssRNA). Moreover, DNA Mycoviruses have been reported recently. These viruses have been detected in almost all fungal phylum but still most of the Mycoviruses remain unknown. Mycoviruses are important in a sense that they mostly remain silent and rarely develop symptom in their hosts. Some Mycoviruses have been reported which are causing irregular growth, abnormal pigmentation and some are involved in changing their host sexual reproduction. For the management of Plant diseases, the importance of Mycoviruses arises because of their most significant effect that is they reduced virulence of their host. Technically the reduced virulence is called hypovirulence. This hypovirulence phenomena has increased importance of Mycoviruses because it has the potential to reduce the crop losses and forests caused by their hosts which are plant pathogenic fungi. In this review, I explore different aspects and importance of Mycoviruses.