About the Author

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Dr R Vinoth Kumar obtained his PhD from the School of Life Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. His work involves studying the emergence and evolution of begomoviruses and satellites associated with diseases in several vegetable crops and weeds. His efforts have resulted in the identification of several novel and diverse viral genomic components, thereby generating genome sequence resources that can be used to devise effective management strategies to curb these diseases. In addition, he has studied the interaction of host plants with viral proteins during pathogenesis, which can be employed to create new antiviral methods against these begomoviruses. Dr Kumar has submitted more than 70 viral genomic sequences to the public database and has published numerous research articles and book chapters. He also had a brief stay at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK with the help of a scholarship from the European Commission. Currently, he is working as a researcher at theNational Centre for Biological Sciences (TIFR-NCBS), Bengaluru, India.