Expansion to plant viruses

[cjcarlson]

As of the moment this thread started, VIRION is very deliberately limited to vertebrates. Other Verena projects, in particular the insectDisease R package interface to the Ecological Database of the World's Insect Pathogens, include some invertebrate data, but the taxonomic lift is pretty rough there, and that planned expansion will take the focus of some dedicated insect virus experts. But one thing we've talked about often, and basically never figured out where to start, is: it might be of tremendous value to go through the process of building a hand-reconciled core (i.e., CLOVER) for plant viruses and then adding the GenBank and GLOBI layers. If any plant virus experts would be interested in doing something like that, the pipelines are pretty flexible, and team Verena would love to work with some folks interested in making that expansion a reality.