Archivio Journal of Plant Pathology

Abstract:

Hibiscus syriacus is a flowering plant of the family Mal- vaceae known as a host of begomoviruses around the world. One plant showing symptoms of leaf curling and yellowing was collected along with a symptomless one from which total DNA was extracted using the CTAB method. Initial begomo- virus detection amplified a 570 bp product from the symp- tomatic plant identified as the viral coat protein (Wyatt and Brown, 1996), which was followed by rolling circle amplifica- tion (RCA) using random hexamer primers (Inoue-Nagata et al., 2004). The RCA product was digested with BamHI, yield- ing a ca. 2.8 kb DNA fragment that was subsequently cloned into pCambia1301. The sequence of the complete genome of a viral isolate denoted PK2 was deposited in GenBank under the accession No. KP780424. No associated genomic compo- nents (DNA-B/DNA β) were detected using the BC1F/BC1R (Hussain et al., 2004) and Beta01/Beta02 (Briddon et al., 2002) primer pairs. The isolate PK2 proved to be DNA-A (2,728 bp) with the typical old world begomovirus genomic orienta- tion. Identity scores were calculated by SDT, which showed that isolate PK2 had maximum 98.8% pairwise identity with Euphorbia yellow leaf curl virus (EYLCuV) (accession No. KM978186). According to the latest demarcation threshold of 91%, PK2 was identified as an isolate of Euphorbia yellow leaf curl virus (KM978186) (Brown et al., 2015). To the best of our knowledge it is the first report of EYLCuV infecting a member of the family Malvaceae.