Shirin Parizad
Ph.D @University of Tehran
Publications
A brief overview of my previous research work; it was focused on a pathogen infecting saffron plants, a major commercial crop of Iran. In this work, we had detected a novel Potyvirus, Saffron latent virus (SaLV-Ir-Kh1), in saffron plants (more than 80% incidence) in Iran and characterized the nucleotide sequence of the full genome of SaLV (Accession no. KY562565). The evolutionary relationship of SaLV to other potyviruses was studied by phylogenetic and recombination analysis (Parizad et al., 2017, 2018). Later, the biological aspects focusing on aphid transmissibility and host range of SaLV were determined (manuscript submitted). As there was a latent infection with no apparent symptoms in plants, a metabolomics approach was taken (HPLC and spectrophotometry) and evaluated the saffron quality which indicated that geographical origins (abiotic) and the infection (biotic) had an impact on saffron quality (Parizad et al., 2019, Parizad et. al., under review). Currently, we are working for a diagnostic tool to detect this pathogen in commercial fields quickly (through ELISA).