Indian Journal of Virology

Tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum) belongs to family Solanaceae is a popular vegetable crop and cultivated on commercial scale throughout the world. It is the largest fresh consumable vegetable crop and approximately one third of the total world yield is consumed in processed form like juices, ketchup, canned peeled tomato and dried raisin tomato. At present tomato is grown in an area of around 3.9 million hectares worldwide with an annual production of 108 million metric tons in the year 2002. Viruses cause great threat to the crop as a result a large economic loss occurs to the country. Major viruses include Tomato mosaic virus (ToMV), Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV), Tomato aspermy virus (TAV), Tomato bushy stunt virus (TBSV), Tomato leaf curl virus (ToLCV), Tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) and Potato virus Y. CMV is an important virus infecting tomato and the infected plant are often become yellow, bushy and stunted. Leaves may be extremely distorted and malformed; leaflets are often much narrowed called as shoestring/fern leaf. Molecular detection of a virus isolate causing shoestring and severe mosaic disease in tomato plants was attempted by RT-PCR using CMV specific primers. RT-PCR using the total nucleic acid from infected leaf samples was done with CMV coat protein gene specific primers. The PCR products showed ~650 bp amplicon during agarose gel electrophoresis. The resulted amplicon was cloned and sequenced. The obtained nucleotide sequence data was corrected as 657 bases and translated into 218 amino acid residues. The sequence data was submitted to Genbank under accession no: DQ 141675. Blast search analysis of sequence data revealed 99% (655/657) identities with coat protein gene of CMV isolate of Amaranth. These results indicated that the virus isolate causing shoe string in tomato possesses the close relationship with Amaranth isolate of CMV and/or tomato may be considered a new host of the CMV Amaranth isolate.