Abstract
Little cherry virus 1 is one of the pathogens associated with little cherry disease of cherries. The host range of the virus is widening and recently it has been detected in apricot trees in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Morocco. To obtain a view about the importance of apricots in the epidemiology of the virus, a survey was conducted in Czech apricot-growing areas. Little cherry virus 1 was detected in seven out of 13 locations, and the infection was noted predominantly in old orchards, but its frequency was low. During the survey, an infected almond tree developing severe leaf mosaic was also detected. Using high-throughput sequencing and Sanger sequencing, five near-complete genome sequences and another 20 partial ORF8 sequences were obtained. Phylogenetic analysis showed a close relationship of most of the apricot isolates to the phylogenetic group G3 with UW2, UW1, and ITMAR isolates. Three apricot isolates, including the almost complete Apr 184R isolate and almond isolate Alm138, showed homology within the phylogenetic group G5. The analysis clearly demonstrates the presence of isolates of this type in Europe. The 4-year-long survey of selected pomological characteristics showed that infection with the virus is generally latent, but the infection could significantly affect the ripening of the fruit of some apricot genotypes. A significant decrease in the fruit yield was noticed for ‘Magyar Kajszi’. The potential routes of the transmission of little cherry virus 1 to apricots are discussed in the context of propagation practice.
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Availability of data and material
The NGS and sequencing data are available on the request from the corresponding author.
Abbreviations
- LChV:
-
Little cherry virus
- LChD:
-
Little cherry disease
- HTS:
-
High-throughput sequencing
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We thank Simon Gill for the English editing the manuscript.
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This research was supported by the Ministry of Agriculture of the Czech Republic, National Agency for Agricultural Research, project no. QK1920124.
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Conceptualization: Milan Navrátil, Dana Šafářová; Methodology: Milan Navrátil, Dana Šafářová;
Material collection: Milan Navrátil, Tomáš Nečas, Jana Suchá, Dana Šafářová; Material and data analysis: Milan Navrátil, Tomáš Nečas, Kateřina Neumanová, Dana Šafářová, Veronika Ševčíková;
Writing - original draft: Dana Šafářová; Writing - review and editing: all authors; Approving: all authors; Funding acquisition: Milan Navrátil.
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Table S1
List of primers. (DOCX 18.3 kb)
Table S2
The analysis of de novo contigs: (a) HTS reads coverage and (b) blastx identity. (XLSX 27 kb)
Table S3
The nucleotide and amino acid sequence distances of apricot little cherry virus 1 isolates and isolates available in GenBank; only complete or nearly complete genome sequences were used. (XLS 91 kb)
Fig. S1
The symptoms of little cherry virus 1 infection: (a) latent infection and (b) netting mosaics on apricot leaves, (c) severe mosaics on almond leaves. (PDF 168 kb)
Fig. S2
The similarity RDP plot analyses of LChV-1 isolates and schematic view of recombinant isolates that were detected. (PDF 693 kb)
Fig. S3
SDTv2 analysis of sequence identity of partial LChV-1 ORF8 sequences generated using the Mafft model. Isolate names are indicated; the colour scale represents the percentage of pairwise identity. (PDF 528 kb)
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Šafářová, D., Ševčíková, V., Neumanová, K. et al. Molecular characterisation of little cherry virus 1 infecting apricots in the Czech Republic. Eur J Plant Pathol 158, 83–97 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10658-020-02056-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10658-020-02056-z