New Disease Reports
New Disease Reports (2005) 11, 27.
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Natural infection of Ornithogalum mosaic virus on Iris from India

V. Chandel, S. Kulshrestha, V. Hallan and A.A. Zaidi*

*zaidi_aijaz@rediffmail.com

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Accepted: 25 Apr 2005

Iris (Iris hollandica, family Iridaceae) is susceptible to infection by a number of potyviruses including Iris mild mosaic virus, Iris severe mosaic virus and Bean yellow mosaic virus (Van der Vlugt & Derks, 1995). In a survey of Iris plantations in and around the Kangra valley (Himachal Pradesh), plants were found exhibiting mottle, mosaic, chlorotic spots on leaves and deformed flowers. Plants with symptoms were tested for the presence of the above potyviruses by specific antibodies to these viruses and some were found negative. However, the negative samples were positive when tested for infection with the help of antibodies specific to the potyvirus group (Agdia, USA).

In order to further delineate the identity of the virus involved, plants were tested by RT-PCR using a universal potyvirus primer pair (Van der Vlugt et al., 1999) designed to amplify partial coat protein gene and 3'-UTR of the viral genome. An amplification product of ~800 bp was obtained and the product was cloned and sequenced (Acc. No. AJ850918). The nucleotide sequence was analyzed with the sequences available in the database using BLAST (Altschul et al., 1997). Pairwise comparisons were performed by the ALIGN-2 program utilizing the DOTHELEX algorithm (Tatusova & Maiden, 1999). The sequence was found to exhibit a close relationship (99% nucleotide sequence identity) to an isolate of Ornithogalum mosaic virus (OrMV) from Iris that has previously been reported from Australia (AF203528). Further, the sequence showed 87-91% identity with OrMV infecting Ornithogalum spp. This is the first report of OrMV infecting Iris from India.

Figure1+
Figure 1: (right): Amplification by RT-PCR of the 3'-UTR and part of the coat protein gene of the potyvirus from an Iris sample showing mosaic, mottle and chlorotic spots on leaves. A universal primer pair for the potyvirus group was used for amplification. The position of the amplification product is indicated by an arrow (lane 1). The size of selected marker bands of a co-electrophoresed 100bp ladder (Bangalore Genei, India) are indicated (lane 2).
Figure 1: (right): Amplification by RT-PCR of the 3'-UTR and part of the coat protein gene of the potyvirus from an Iris sample showing mosaic, mottle and chlorotic spots on leaves. A universal primer pair for the potyvirus group was used for amplification. The position of the amplification product is indicated by an arrow (lane 1). The size of selected marker bands of a co-electrophoresed 100bp ladder (Bangalore Genei, India) are indicated (lane 2).

References

  1. Altschul SF, Thomas LM, Alejandro AS, Jinghui Z, Zheng Z, Webb M, David JL, 1997. Gapped BLAST and PSIBLAST: a new generation of protein database search programs. Nucleic Acids Research 25, 3389-3402.
  2. Tatusova AT, Maiden TL, 1999. Blast 2 sequences - a new tool for comparing protein and nucleotide sequences. FEMS Microbiology Letters 174, 247-250.
  3. Van der Vlugt CIM, Derks AFLM, 1995. Iris. In: Loebenstein G, Lawson RH, Brunt AA, eds. Virus and Virus-like Diseases of Bulb and Flower Crops. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 303-312.
  4. Van der Vulgt RAA, Steffens P, Cuperus C, Brag E, Lesemann DE, Bos L, Vetten HJ, 1999. Further evidence that Shallot yellow stripe virus (SYSV) is a distinct potyvirus and reidentification of Welsh onion yellow stripe virus as a SYSV strain. Phytopathology 89, 148-155.
This report was formally published in Plant Pathology

©2005 The Authors