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BIOLOGICAL AND GENETIC CHARACTERIZATION OF PHYSOSTEGIA CHLOROTIC MOTTLE VIRUS IN EUROPE BASED ON HOST RANGE, LOCATION, AND TIME

Coline Temple1, Arnaud G. Blouin1,9, Kris De Jonghe2, Yoika Foucart2, Marleen Botermans3, Marcel Westenberg3, Ruben Schoen3, Pascal Gentit4, Michèle Visage4, Eric Verdin5, Catherine Wipf-Scheibel5, Heiko Ziebell6, Yahya Z. A. Gaafar6, Amjad Zia6, Xiao-Hua Yan6, Katja R. Richert-Pöggeler6, Roswitha Ulrich7, Mark Paul S. Rivarez8, Denis Kutnjak8, Ana Vučurović8, Sébastien Massart1* https://doi.org/10.1094/PDIS-12-21-2800-RE We report here how prepublication datasharing resulted in an international collaboration across eight laboratories in five countries, enabling an in-depth characterization of Physostegia chlorotic mottle virus (PhCMoV). In this study, we highlight the first detection of the virus in six European countries and in seven new natural host plants. Our research established that PhCMoV is associated with severe symptoms and the additional 21 generated sequences allowed to study its phylogeny across time and geographic locations.

Application of high throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies enabled the first identification of Physostegia chlorotic mottle virus (PhCMoV) in 2018 in Austria. Subsequently, PhCMoV was detected in Germany and Serbia on tomatoes showing severe fruit mottling and ripening anomalies. We report here how prepublication datasharing resulted in an international collaboration across eight laboratories in five countries, enabling an in-depth characterization of PhCMoV. The independent studies converged toward its recent identification in eight additional European countries and confirmed its presence in samples collected 20 years ago (2002). The natural plant host range was expanded from two to nine species across seven families, and we confirmed the association of PhCMoV presence with severe fruit symptoms on economically important crops such as tomato, eggplant, and cucumber. Mechanical inoculations of selected isolates in the greenhouse established the causality of the symptoms on a new indexing host range. In addition, phylogenetic analysis showed a low genomic variation across the 29 near-complete genome sequences available. Furthermore, a strong selection pressure within a specific ecosystem was suggested by nearly identical sequences recovered from different host plants through time. Overall, this study describes the European distribution of PhCMoV on multiple plant hosts, including economically important crops on which the virus can cause severe fruit symptoms. This work demonstrates how to efficiently improve knowledge on an emergent pathogen by sharing HTS data and provides a solid knowledge foundation for further studies on plant rhabdoviruses.



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