First report of Narcissus latent virus in New Zealand

Iris (Iridaceae) is a prized ornamental, valued for its beauty and as a source of perfumes and medicinal products. In New Zealand, irises are grown mostly for the domestic cut flower market, estimated at NZ$70 million in 2005 (Anon, 2005).

Iris tingitana plants showing leaf mosaic symptoms were collected from a commercial grower near Palmerston North, New Zealand in July 2004. Leaf samples with symptoms tested positive for potyvirus infection by ELISA, using a potyvirus universal monoclonal antibody (Agdia Inc., Elkhart, USA). Universal potyvirus primers PV2I/T7 and PV1/SP6 (Mackenzie et al., 1998) were used to amplify a product of approximately 1.8 Kb, spanning part of the NIb gene, the entire CP gene and the 3' UTR. The amplicon was cloned into the vector pGEM^®-T Easy (Promega Corporation, Madison, WI, USA) and the sequence analyzed using BioEdit (version7.0.5) and DNA-star (version 4.0). The 1815 bp sequence (Genbank Accession No. DQ450199) showed 96% identity for both nucleotide and amino acid sequences to the only other example of Narcissus latent virus (NLV) listed in GenBank (Accession No. U58770; Badge et al. 1997). This is the first report of NLV in New Zealand.