First Report of a strain of Tobacco leaf curl Japan virus associated with a satellite DNAin honeysuckle in Japan

Tobacco leaf curl Japan virus (TbLCJV) causes heavy losses in tomato crops in Japan. Honeysuckle yellow vein virus has been isolated from Honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) a perennial weed, with yellow vein symptoms, suggesting infection by a begomovirus. Honeysuckle with typical yellow vein symptoms was collected whilst growing besides tomato crops in Ibaraki, Japan during 2001.

Total DNA was extracted from infected leaves and PCR was done using begomovirus-specific degenerate primers (Briddon and Markham, 1994). A product of approximately 2.7kbp was obtained, cloned and sequenced. A pair of degenerate primers was then designed (virion-sense primer 5�- GAGCTCTTAGCCGCCTGAATGTTC-3�; complementary-sense primer 5�- GAGCTCGTCAGATGTTAAGACCTAC-3�) and used in PCR to amplify a product of approximately 2.8kbp which was cloned and sequenced (GenBank Accession no. AB287439). Efforts to detect DNA-B components associated with this virus were made by PCR using primers PCRc1 and PBL1v2040 (Rojas et al., 1993) but were not successful. From these results, we concluded that this virus is a monopartite begomovirus. We detected a DNAβ (1346 nt, GenBank Accession no. AB287442) from the same honeysuckle plant with yellow vein symptoms. Comparisons of the complete nucleotide sequence of this begomovirus with those of other full length begomovirus DNA-As in GenBank gave highest similarity (92%) to TbLCJV-[JP3] (AB079766). This is the first report of a TbLCJV infecting honeysuckle in Japan.