Virology
The main aim of this group is to promote Plant Virology as a subject, both in the UK and overseas through innovative outreaching activities such as organising conferences and workshops and bringing people together for discussions and meetings on recent developments in the area. To this effect, the group organizes a 3-day conference ‘Advances in Virology’ every 18 months mainly aiming to encourage PhD students and early career scientists to take up and/or continue working on plant viruses. We also offer two student-specific competitions at the conference – the Bryan Harrison prize for the best oral presentation and the Raymond and Roger Hull prize for the best poster presentation.
In order to foster links between UK and overseas plant virologists especially to help grow the number of people working on plant viruses within Europe, the Virology Group Committee includes members from European countries (currently Spain). Please get in touch with the Convenor if you are interested in becoming part of the group.

Convenor
Miguel Aranda
Miguel A. Aranda is a Research Professor at the Department of Stress and Plant Pathology of “Del Segura” Center for Applied Biology (CEBAS) from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) (Spain). He is also a founder and shareholder of the technology-based company Abiopep S.L. Alongside this, he is the Senior Editor for the Plant-Pathogen Interaction area of Annals of Applied Biology and for the Virology area of Molecular Plant Pathology. Since 2009 he has been teaching applied virology in the Master's Degree in Plant Biology and Biotechnology at the University of Murcia (Spain). From 1995 to 1998 he carried out postdoctoral research at John Innes Centre (Norwich, UK). During 2008, 2011-2012 and 2017 he carried out sabbatical stays at John Innes Centre (Norwich, UK), U. C. Berkeley (CA, USA) and U.C. Davis (CA, USA), respectively.
Miguel has been working for more than 25 years to understand the biology of plant viruses and how they interact with their hosts. From an applied point of view, his work aims at generating sustainable strategies to control plant diseases induced by viruses, with special emphasis on identifying, characterizing and introgressing genetic resistance to plant viruses in crops. Important contributions of Miguel´s work in this area include the characterisation of resistance genes and resistance mechanisms to viruses in melon, cucumber and tomato.
Group Members