Microorganisms are ubiquitous in the environment and represent the major form of life on Earth. They play fundamental roles in ecosystems, contributing to their functioning, and cover the surface of other organisms, interacting with their physiology. Viruses, besides our common negative vision of their role as pathogens, are now recognized as essential in order to 
maintain an ecological balance within our ecosystems. Therefore, viruses are key to environmental and human health, to science as well as to bioeconomy and biotechnology applications. Hence the need to develop and improve collections and biobanks that include not only human viruses, but also plant, microbial, and environmental viruses.
PlaVIt collection, originated in the early 70’s, is located in Turin and Bari at the Institute for Sustainable Plant Protection (IPSP-CNR) and has more than 1,000 isolates, authenticated at serological and/or molecular level, of plant viruses from different countries and different botanical species. PlaVIt follows national and international guidelines for the collection and storage of isolates, maintaining for each of them a dataset of information essential for characterization and identification and constantly upgraded and quality-checked. Distributes materials to academic and private research centers. PlaVIt is a partner of the SUS-MIRRI.IT ( https://www.sus-mirri.it/it/ ), EVA-GLOBAL (https://www.european-virus-archive.com/) and BioMemory ( https://biomemory.cnr.it/ ) projects and is a member of the European Culture Collection Organization (ECCO – https://www.eccosite.org/italy/) and the World Data Center for Microorganisms (WDCM – https://www.wdcm.org/).
Participants:
Leading Scientist: Gian Paolo ACCOTTO
Quality Manager: Gian Paolo ACCOTTO
Curator (Torino): Marina CIUFFO
Curator (Bari): Luisa RUBINO
Co-curator: Anna Maria VAIRA
Co-curator: Laura MIOZZI
Co-curator: Maria Isabella PRIGIGALLO
Co-curator: Marco FORGIA