Epidemiological Study of Begomoviruses in the Middle East and North African Region

Abstract

Eastern countries. Full length FASTA sequences of the begomovirus genome, have been extracted and the parameters - host range, year of collection and geographic distribution of the begomoviruses have been tabulated. Sequences were aligned by muscle alignments and species were identified by the Species Demarcation Tool (SDT) and validated by sequence distance. Graphs and maps were generated using MS Excel while the phylogenetic tree was constructed using MEGA X’s maximum likelihood. To date, five hundred and twenty (520) species of begomoviruses have been reported worldwide, of which 21 species and ~2477 isolates are found in North African and Middle Eastern countries. Tomato leaf curl New Delhi virus has been dominating in the regions with 603 isolates followed by Tomato yellow leaf curl Axarquia virus (384 isolates), Tomato yellow leaf curl Iran Virus (224 isolates), Tomato leaf curl Oman virus (207 isolates), and Tomato yellow leaf curl Al Batinah virus has (202 isolates). Most isolates are found in Pakistan (553 isolates), followed by China (370 isolates), Oman (304 isolates), India (215 isolates), Iran (146 isolates), Australia (112 isolates), Jordan (106 isolates), Spain (104 isolates) and South Korea (58 isolates). The majority of begomovirus isolates infect Solanum lycopersicum (1313 isolates), Ipomoea batatas (109 isolates), Lycopersicon esculentum (85 isolates), and Abelmoschus esculentus (82 isolates) in North African and Middle Eastern countries. Solanum lycopersicum has a maximum number of isolates of about 1313 isolates. Pakistan has a maximum number of isolates of about 553 isolates. Begomoviruses have expanded their range of hosts, and they have several alternative hosts. A single species has the potential to affect members of multiple plant groups. In addition, a single plant is also the host for many species of begomoviruses. The number of isolates that need to be renamed increases, and they move from one country to another.