Interference between variants of peach latent mosaic viroid reveals novel features of its fitness landscape: implications for detection
Date
2017Cita bibliográfica
Serra, P., Bertolini, E., Martínez, M. C., Cambra, M., & Flores, R. (2017). Interference between variants of peach latent mosaic viroid reveals novel features of its fitness landscape: implications for detection. Scientific reports, 7, 42825.Abstract
Natural populations of peach latent mosaic viroid (PLMVd) are complex mixtures of variants. During routine testing, TaqMan rtRT-PCR and RNA gel-blot hybridization produced discordant results with some PLMVd isolates. Analysis of the corresponding populations showed that they were exclusively composed of variants (of class II) with a structural domain different from that of the reference and many other variants (of class I) targeted by the TaqMan rtRT-PCR probe. Bioassays in peach revealed that a representative PLMVd variant of class II replicated without symptoms, generated a progeny with low nucleotide diversity, and, intriguingly, outcompeted a representative symptomatic variant of class I when co-inoculated in equimolecular amounts. A number of informative positions associated with the higher fitness of variants of class II have been identified, and novel sets of primers and probes for universal or specific TaqMan rtRT-PCR detection of PLMVd variants have been designed and tested.