Dieke Boezen MSc

My research interest lies at the interface of plant virology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. I am interested in variation in natural virus populations, using high-throughput sequencing combined with fieldwork to explore virus evolution in detail. Specifically, my research focusses on how the environment (e.g. host diversity, land-use change) affects genetic and genomic variation in viruses. I explore this diversity in natural populations of cucumber mosaic virus (CMV), which is a multipartite plant virus (a plant virus which packages its genome into separate particles). I am also involved in a project on Canadian baculovirus populations, where we study genomic changes in the virus as its host population (the western tent caterpillar) goes through cyclical changes in population density.