1997 Nusbaum Scholar

Dr. Wenping Qiu

The Nusbaum Scholar Award is given annually to an outstanding, recent PhD graduate in the Department in recognition of his or her scientific productivity and leadership in research. The award which consists of an engraved plaque and a check for $1,000, is made possible by a generous gift to the Department by the late Dr. Charles J. and Mrs. Virginia Nusbaum.

Dr. Nusbaum was a distinguished member of the faculty of our Department from 1948-1973 and was the Department's most recent William Neal Reynolds Professor. For those of us who had the opportunity to know and interact with "Doc Nubaum," he was indeed a truly special and wonderful person. He was an outstanding thinker, a true scholar and an outstanding researcher who truly believed that the answers to today's and tomorrow's problems in agriculture, and food production research, were to be found in fundamental research that examined facets of real-world questions. His depth and breadth of knowledge made him a truly enjoyable person with whom to talk.

Dr. Wenping Qiu received his Bachelor of Science degree from Henan Teacher's University, Henan Province, in China in 1985. He received his Master of Science degree in virology from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1988.He then continued research at the Institute on the diagnosis, detection and pathogenesis of citrus exocortis viroid from 1988-1990. From 1990-1993 he served as a quarantine officer for the Haikou Animal and Plant Quarantine Bureau.

In 1993, he joined our Department as a PhD student in the program of Dr. Jim Moyer where his research concentrated on several aspects of host resistance and the overcoming of host resistance by Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus or TSWV. Viruses in the same family as TSWV are noted for the devastating diseases that they cause, often with high mortality rates. Sin Nombre virus (Four Corners disease) and Rift Valley Fever are two of the viruses in this family which have been in the news recently. The Tospoviruses also cause significant losses in many crops including peanut, tomato, tobacco, pepper, lettuce and a wide range of floral crops.

One of the major accomplishments in Dr. Qiu's research is the development of the first system for genetic analysis of a plant virus with ambisense RNAs. More importantly, however, he was able to use this system to begin to address the important question of how this virus overcomes resistance-- which it does almost without exception (i.e., TSWV has overcome virtually every source of resistance introduced into an agronomic crop). In these studies, he revealed that the molecular determinants responsible for overcoming resistance imparted by the nucleocapsid gene are located on two segments of the genome. This has significant implications for all future development of resistant cultivars to TSWV using viral transgenes and is counter to the current dogma. It also provides the first evidence which begins to suggest that resistance is a multiple stage process involving more than just the interaction of the transgene and its viral homologue. While we have known for sometime that TSWV exists as a complex population of viral isolates in nature, Dr. Qiu is the first to demonstrate that host genes directly drive the population to reassort genome segments into an isolate that can overcome resistance. While these results have obvious near-term impact in an applied sense, Wenping has made additional contributions to our overall understanding of viral genetics. Among these is the first evidence for the association of a regulatory function for the intergenic region of one of the genome segments in competitiveness of that genome segment. He has associated a duplicated sequence of 33 nucleotides in length with the ability to out compete other segments. These findings are quite significant and provide an example of how fundamental understanding, derived through high quality research, improves our ability to address real-world problems.

Wenping has presented portions of his research at the annual meetings of the American Society for Virology and the American Phytopathological Society and has received travel grants from both societies. Portions of his work also have been presented at two international meetings - one in Israel and one in Taiwan. He has one manuscript accepted for publication in Virology and another manuscript in review in the journal Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions. He is currently a research associate with Drs. Herman and Karen-Beth Scholthof at Texas A&M University.

– Lee Campbell