Potato virus yisolated from pepper fields in Tehran Province.

Potato Virus Y was known as the main cause of yellowing and vein necrosis of pepper in Tehran Province, using Double Antibody Sandwich Elisa (DAS-ELISA). Biological properties including host range of the isolate was determined after biological purification. Host range studies showed that pepper isolate of PVY caused vein clearing and mosaic symptoms on Datura metel and Capsicum annum, mosaic on Nicotiana tabacum cv. White Barley, N. tabacum cv. Samsun and N. rustica but didn't show any symptoms on Physalis floridana, Chenopodium amaranticolor, C. quinoa and Solanum tuberosum. Also the virus was physically purified from propagative hosts: Datura metel, Nicotiana tabacum cv. White Barley and Capsicum annum using Leiser & Richter (1978) method. The A260/280 absorbance ratio of the isolate was 1.16, 1.50 and 1.04 for purified preparations from D. metel, N. tabacum cv. White Barley and C. annum respectively. SDS-PAGE of the coat protein extracted from purified virus preparations gave bands at position of about 34 KD and Western Blotting (using PVY antiserum with 1/1000 dilution, obtained from DSMZ, Germany) confirmed its as the PVY coat protein. In order to prepare antiserum, five injections were given at 7-10 days intervals to rabbit. A week after the last injection the rabbit was bled and the antiserum collected. The primer pairs NIA/F and NIA/R (Glais et al., 2005) were used in IC-RT-PCR and the length of the amplified fragment was 752 bp. This is the first report of PVY incidence in pepper fields in Iran.