Archivio Journal of Plant Pathology

Abstract:

Light yellow striping of the leaves and stunting were observed in different garlic cultivars in an experimental field at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (Delhi, India) in December 2011. Cloves and leaves from 3-month- old plants of 21 different cultivars were collected and tested by DAS-ELISA with antisera to Onion yellow dwarf virus (OYDV) and Leek yellow stripe virus (LYSV) (Bioreba, Switzerland). Four out of the 21 cultivars were positive for LYSV, whereas all of them were positive for OYDV. To confirm the presence of LYSV, total RNA was extracted from 100 mg of LYSV-positive leaves with the RNeasy plant mini kit (Qiagen, USA) and used in RT-PCR with spe- cific primers 5’-CAGGRACWTTTAGTGTDCCACG-3’ and 5’-ACCATCRAGATGGTGCATCCG-3’ designed on conserved regions of the coat protein (CP) gene. Se- quencing of the ca. 656 bp amplicon from cultivar AC-50 confirmed the presence of LYSV. To further characterize LYSV in AC-50, the full length CP gene was amplified with primers 5’-GCTGGTGAGGAGATTGATG-3’ and 5’-CTGCATATGCGCACCATC-3’. The 864 bp nucleotide sequence obtained from the cloned PCR product showed 83% identity with LYSV isolate VN/L3 from Vietnam (GenBank accession No. DQ925453) and 90% amino acid sequence identity with a LYSV isolate from Myanmar (Gen- Bank accession No. BAJ04729). Several viruses are known to occur in garlic in India (Baranwal et al., 2011) but, to our knowledge, this is the first report of LYSV. This find- ing prompts the need for evaluating the impact of LYSV on Indian garlic cultivars and for producing virus-free plants.