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
