bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/602144; this version posted April 17, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 Endophytic Virome 2 3 Saurav Das1,2*, Madhumita Barooah1 and Nagendra Thakur3 4 1 Department of Agricultural Biotechnology, Assam Agricultural University, Jorhat, Assam, 5 India 6 2 Department of Agronomy and Horticulture, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, Nebraska, USA 7 3 Department of Microbiology, Sikkim University, 6th Mile, Tadong-737102, Gangtok, Sikkim, 8 India 9 10 *Corresponding Author: Dr. Saurav Das, Department of Agronomy and Horticulture, University 11 of Nebraska – Lincoln, Nebraska, USA, Email :
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[email protected], 12 Phone: +1-308-631-1486 13 14 Abstract 15 Endophytic microorganisms are well established for their mutualistic relationship and plant 16 growth promotion through production of different metabolites. Bacteria and fungi are the major 17 group of endophytes which were extensively studied. Virus are badly named for centuries and 18 their symbiotic relationship was vague. Recent development of omics tools especially next 19 generation sequencing has provided a new perspective towards the mutualistic viral relationship. 20 Endogenous virus which has been much studied in animal and are less understood in plants. In 21 this study, we described the endophytic viral population of tea plant root. Viral population (9%) 22 were significantly less while compared to bacterial population (90%). Viral population of tea 23 endophytes were mostly dominated by endogenous pararetroviral sequences (EPRV) derived 24 from Caulimoviridae and Geminiviridae.