Spent a lot of time in the California desert, have you???

Jeri

A more practical approach may be to pay or otherwise reward Rosarians who identify clean plants in climates where virus spotting is easy.

Seems like it would be better to either quit growing roses, or quit reading arcane scientific extracts on RMV laboratory tests.

why not try? Better than paying for all the hard lab work. If some clean roses can be propagated from desert grown plants I think its great. Right now I have a beautiful sport from a virused medallion I got from a big box store. I would love to clean this rose of its RMV because it's unique in the world. Just like medallion but ruffly and pink to pinkpeach. RMV is something the rose world could do without. If it was cheap to get rid of, don't you think everyone would do it. I say give this desert idea a chance.

I'm in solidarity with Kittymoonbeam: Like Kitty, I say, "give this desert idea a chance" -- even tho, as a society, we don't have a very good record of giving very good ideas very good chances.

Here's a link suggesting chance-taking that far more than a million and a quarter folks have already linked to. With roses and with other things, hope springs eternal . . .

Here is a link that might be useful: Taking Chances

The thing is, you don't live in the desert, so you don't understand how a desert climate works.
It does NOT work like a heated greenhouse.

You might better succeed in Central America, or someplace else where hot temperatures don't drop at night.

Jeri

Or Florida and other places in the South East where there is little difference between day and night temps. We can easily have 40 - 50 degree swings day to night. Makes for some wonderful evening temps! Kim

There are many literature papers that utilized alternate high and low temperatures. In fact there are those who feel: "Alternating high and low temperature thermotherapy regimes were more effective in decreasing virus titre than constant high temperatures."
The above quote is from the link below:

Here is a link that might be useful: link for quote