Detection of Whitefly-transmitted Geminiviruses from Tomato by PCR

From the conserved regions of the reported nucleotide sequences of whitefly-transmitted geminiviruses (WTGV), a pair of degenerate primers was designed to anneal to the conserved sequence. The tomato samples infected geminivirus-like from Guangdong were detected by PCR. The results showed that a 356bp specific fragment was amplified from the samples. The specific fragment was cloned and sequenced, and the sequence was compared with all nucleotide sequences in GenBank by Blast of NCBI. The result showed that the fragment belonged to Geminiviridae DNA. So the degenerate primers may be used to detect the WTGV from tomato in Guangdong. Moreover, both of the homology of the fragment between WTGV from tomato in Guangdong and the reported WTGV in the world and WTGV from tomato in Guangxi were under 82%. These results implied that the WTGV from tomato in Guangdong differed from the above-mentioned WTGV.