مشخصات پژوهش

Okra enation leaf curl virus (OELCuV) (Begomovirus, Geminiviridae) was first reported in papaya plants in southeastern Iran (Bananaj et al. 2016). During a survey for identification of nanoviruses and geminiviruses infecting leafy vegetables, five symptomatic basil (Ocimum basillicum L., Lamiaceae) samples showing severe yellowing, leaf curling and green vein banding were collected in 2021 in Jiroft farms (Kerman province, south-eastern Iran). Total DNA was isolated from symptomatic leaves using the CTAB method and characterized by rolling circle amplification (RCA) to enrich circular DNA molecules of the samples using TempliPhi kit (GE Healthcare, USA). RCA products were digested with different restriction enzymes to obtain an unit-length genome of the associated geminivirus. Due to a similar restriction pattern for all the RCA products, HindIII restricted fragment (~2.7 kb) of one sample (isolate BasilJ-2) was cloned into HindIII restricted pBluescript SK(+) plasmid followed by Sanger sequencing of the recombinant plasmid. Sequence analysis using BLASTn showed that the basil sample was infected with OELCuV. To detect satellite molecules, PCR with primer pairs Alpha-F/Alpha-R and Beta01/Beta02) (Briddon et al. 2002; Salari et al. 2023) was performed to amplify alphasatellite and betasatellite genomes, respectively, which resulted in a~1.3 kb alphasatellite amplicon. The PCR product was cloned into the T/A vector (pGEM®-T Easy Vector, Promega, USA) and Sanger sequenced. BLASTn analysis indicated the presence of Gossypium darwinii symptomless alphasatellite (GenBank accession numbers OR401934 and OR401935) with <98.9% and <98.8% nucleotide identities with the Iranian GenBank isolates, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of OELCuV and associated alphasatellite infecting basil.in the basil sample. The full-length OELCuV and associated alphasatellite genomes were 2747 and 1357 nts in size