Cultivated grapevines represent a symptomless reservoir for the transmission of hop stunt viroid to hop crops: 15 years of evolutionary analysis.

ABSTRACT: Hop stunt was a mysterious disorder that first emerged in the 1940s in commercial hops in Japan. To investigate the origin of this disorder, we infected hops with natural Hop stunt viroid (HpSVd) isolates derived from four host species (hop, grapevine, plum and citrus), which except for hop represent possible sources of the ancestral viroid. These plants were maintained for 15 years, then analyzed the HpSVd variants present. Here we show that the variant originally found in cultivated grapevines gave rise to various combinations of mutations at positions 25, 26, 54, 193, and 281. However, upon prolonged infection, these variants underwent convergent evolution resulting in a limited number of adapted mutants. Some of them showed nucleotide sequences identical to those currently responsible

SUBMITTER: Kawaguchi-Ito Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2793511 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature