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First Report of Soybean yellow mottle mosaic virus in Soybean in North America

Soybean yellow mottle mosaic virus (SYMMV) is a soybean-infecting virus recently discovered in Korea that initially induces bright yellow mosaic on leaves followed by stunting and reduced growth of older leaves (1). Nucleotide sequence analysis of genomic RNA of the Korean SYMMV isolate suggested that the virus is a new member of the genus Carmovirus in the family Tombusviridae. To determine whether SYMMV is present in the United States, single leaflets were collected without regard for symptoms from 7 to 10 plants in each of 136 plots in August 2008 from a research field in Stoneville, MS that contained 16 plant introductions (including five from Korea) and ‘Williams 82’. Samples were grouped into 10 pools of 100 leaves from which total RNA was extracted with the Qiagen RNeasy Plant Mini Kit (Germantown, MD), reverse transcribed, and amplified with SuperScript III Platinum SYBR Green One-Step Quantitative Real-time Reverse Transcriptase-PCR Kit (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, CA) and two pairs of oligonucleotide primers (5′-CGTCTGCCAGGGTTTAATACTA-3′, and 5′-GATTAGCATGTCAGGGTGGTCG-3′; and 5′-ACTGAGTCCCCTGCTTAT-3′ and 5′-CATCACTAGCGTCYGGATCA-3′) that were designed from regions conserved between SYMMV and Cowpea mottle virus (CPMoV; a related and seed-transmitted carmovirus). Six 100-leaflet pools were positive with both primer sets and four pools were negative with both primer sets. Total RNA extracted from one positive pool was reverse transcribed using SuperScript II reverse transcriptase and a primer complementary to nt 4,000 to 4,009 of the SYMMV genome and amplified using iProof DNA polymerase (Bio-Rad, Hercules, CA) as two overlapping DNA fragments using primers corresponding to nt 1 to 21 and complementary to nt 3,483 to 3,508 and corresponding to nt 3,366 to 3,391 and complementary to nt 4,000 to 4,009. DNA fragments were sequenced using a BigDye Terminator Cycle Sequencing Kit and ABI 3730XL capillary sequencers (Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA). The 4,009-nt sequence of the Mississippi SYMMV isolate (GenBank Accession No. FJ707484) was 96% identical to the Korean SYMMV isolate and 65% identical to CPMoV. Because of the sampling techniques used, it was not possible to associate SYMMV-positive plants with disease symptoms in Mississippi. To our knowledge, this is the first report of SYMMV in North America.

Reference: (1) M. Nam et al. Online publication. doi:10.1077/s00705-009-0480. Arch. Virol., 2009.