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Plant viruses have an average 90% fatality rate. These viruses have been a bane for farmers as there are no cures available and it takes more than six months just to make a diagnosis. But now a Korean team of scientists has developed a technology to mass produce a plant virus antibody. Here’s more.

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Plant viruses are known to decimate crops. Roughly a thousand such viruses have been reported in Korea. Early diagnosis is important, since viral infections occur in a wide variety of crops and the fatality rate can reach almost 90%, but visual confirmation is difficult. Resulting damages to farmers amounted to more than 800 million dollars last year alone. The Rural Development Administration and Professor Lee Suk-chan's team at Sungkyunkwan University have jointly developed technology to mass produce antibodies enabling early diagnoses of plant viruses. Antibodies are needed to diagnose viral infections, but the conventional technique if using the blood of lab animals wasn't very efficient. The new findings successfully substitute human genes to enable mass production even from a small amount. The most prominent feature of the technology is that it shortens the antibody production time from at least six months to just three weeks.

[Soundbite] Kwon Min(Researcher, Rural Development Admin.) : "Since we use colon bacillus to mass-produce antibodies, we can make any antibodies we want regardless of the time and place."

The Rural Development Administration plans to distribute the new virus diagnosis technology to Korean farmers and build an antibody bank for plant viruses to counter viral crop infections in their early stages.