Professor Adrian Gibbs ‘Viruses of Australian plants: what, where and when?’

Adrian Gibbs is a virologist.  He and his wife Pat are ANBG devotees, and were undergraduate students in the Botany Depart of Imperial College, University of London from 1953-1956.  Adrian first played with a virus in 1955 in a prac class, and never gave up.  Until 1966 he worked on crop and bee viruses at Rothamsted, which is the world's oldest agricultural research station and most famous for its long term agronomy experiments, and also for the discovery of 'super phosphate' and the invention of pyrethroids.  A chance meeting with Max Day led to him joining Frank Fenner's department in 1966, and he has worked at ANU ever since on various aspects of virus evolution.

Plants, animals, fungi and bacteria are the major groups of cellular organisms, and familiar to everyone.  Less well-known are viruses, which are subcellular organisms that infect, and replicate in, cellular organisms.  Viruses are more numerous and variable than cellular organisms.  They leave no fossils, so trying to understand their origins and evolution can only be done indirectly.  Adrian will describe some viruses of local crop, weed and native plants, and recent discoveries of where they came from, and when.