Evidence of recombination events in the homing protein domain of GFLV

Infectious degeneration, one of the most economically relevant and widespread virus diseases of the grapevine, is characterized by two distinct field syndromes known as infectious malformations (MF) and yellow mosaic (YM) induced, respectively, by distorting and chromogenic strains of Grapevine fanleaf virus (GFLV). A molecular characterization to individualize sequence variants in MF and YM strains of GFLV was conducted, and showed the presence of molecular fingerprints in the 2AHP of YM- and MF-GFLV isolates. In this study, the possible role of the 2AHP, taking into consideration additional YM-GFLV isolates associated with yellow mosaic symptoms, was further investigated in more detail with reference to recombination events possibly occurring in that region of the genome. However, the construction of YM- and MF-GFLV infectious cDNA clones and their expression in herbaceous hosts and/or grapevine seedlings would greatly contribute to clarify the exact role of the 2AHP domain in the infectivity and symptomatology.