title: Interference between variants of peach latent mosaic viroid reveals novel features of its fitness landscape: implications for detection.
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.
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Biología Molecular y Celular de Plantas, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas-Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain.
authors.forename: Pedro
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Serra
authors.affiliation: Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Agrarias, Moncada, Valencia, Spain.|Departamento de Fitossanidade, Faculdade de Agronomia, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil.
authors.forename: Edson
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bertolini
authors.affiliation: Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Agrarias, Moncada, Valencia, Spain.
authors.forename: M Carmen
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Martínez
authors.affiliation: Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Agrarias, Moncada, Valencia, Spain.
authors.forename: Mariano
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cambra
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Biología Molecular y Celular de Plantas, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas-Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain.
authors.forename: Ricardo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Flores
mesh_terms: D056084:Genetic Fitness; D014644:Genetic Variation; D008958:Models, Molecular; D009690:Nucleic Acid Conformation; D010942:Plant Viruses / Q000235:genetics / Q000502:physiology*; D027861:Prunus / Q000821:virology*; D012367:RNA, Viral / Q000737:chemistry / Q000235:genetics*; D014779:Virus Replication
chemical_list: D012367:RNA, Viral