Abstract
Cherry trees from Spain affected by cherry leaf scorch (CLS), a fungal disease proposed to be caused by Apiognomonia erythrostoma, show symptoms (translucent-chlorotic leaf spots evolving into rusty areas) very similar to those of cherry chlorotic rusty spot disease (CCRS) and Amasya cherry disease, reported in Italy and Turkey, respectively. The three maladies are closely associated with 10-12 double-stranded viral RNAs, and CCRS is additionally associated with two cherry small circular RNAs (cscRNA1 and cscRNA2). Here, we report that a small viroid-like RNA similar to the CCRS-associated cscRNA1 is also present in CLS-affected trees, thus extending the link between the two diseases. Both CLS and CCRS cscRNA1 elements have common features, including sequence identity (88 %), a predicted quasi rod-like conformation with short bifurcations at both termini, and the presence of hammerhead ribozymes in the strands of both polarities. However, cscRNA2, apparently derived from cscRNA1 by deletion of a short hairpin, was not detected in CLS-affected material. Although the biological nature of cscRNAs is unknown, the identification of at least cscRNA1 in different cherry cultivars and in two distinct geographic areas (Spain and Italy), always in close association with the same mycoviral dsRNAs, supports that these viroid-like RNAs could be satellite RNAs.
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Acknowledgments
Work in the laboratories of B.N. and F.D.S. has been partially supported by a dedicated grant (CISIA) of the Ministero dell’Economia e Finanze Italiano to the CNR (Legge n. 191/2009), and in the R.F. laboratory, by a grant (BFU2011-28443) from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of Spain.
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705_2013_1843_MOESM1_ESM.ppt
(PPT 868 kb) Supplemental Material online Figure S1. Multiple sequence alignment of cscRNA variants from a CLS-affected tree. Nucleotide changes with respect to the reference variant cscRNA1-es.14 (at the top) are in bold and underlined. Hyphens denote gaps, and asterisks indicate polymorphic positions. Flags delimit regions corresponding to hammerhead ribozymes, vertical arrows mark self-cleavage sites, and nucleotides conserved in most natural hammerheads are boxed. Solid and open symbols refer to plus- and minus-polarity strands, respectively. Horizontal arrows indicate the regions covered by the primer pairs used for cloning. Full-length cDNAs of the variants cscRNA-es.1 to cscRNA-es.9 (accession numbers KC993891 to KC993898) and cscRNA-es.10 to cscRNA-es.14 (accession numbers KF516923 to 516926) were cloned with primer pairs PI/PII and PVI/PVII, respectively. The gray background indicates the nucleotides that in the proposed secondary structure (Fig. 1C) form hairpin I (Hp I), which is absent in the smaller cscRNA2 from isolate CCRS [13]
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Minoia, S., Navarro, B., Covelli, L. et al. Viroid-like RNAs from cherry trees affected by leaf scorch disease: further data supporting their association with mycoviral double-stranded RNAs. Arch Virol 159, 589–593 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00705-013-1843-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00705-013-1843-z