Comparison of the complete sequences of three different isolates of Pepino mosaic virus: size variability of the TGBp3 protein between tomato and L. peruvianum isolates.

The complete nucleotide sequence of the genomes of two Spanish isolates (LE-2000 and LE-2002) from tomato and one Peruvian isolate (LP-2001) from Lycopersicon peruvianum of the Pepino mosaic virus (PepMV) were determined. The tomato isolates share identities higher than 99%, while the genome of LP-2001 had mean nucleotide identities of 95.6% to 96.0% with tomato isolates. The predicted amino acid sequences showed similarities ranging between 95.2% and 100% with TGBp3 and TGBp2 and CP proteins, respectively. In LP-2001 two main differences were found with respect to the tomato isolates; (i) the 5' untranslated region (UTR) was 2 nt shorter by deletion at position 12-13 and it had some polymorphims at the putative promoter sequence reported for PepMV tomato isolates and other potexviruses, which could be functionally significant for RNA replication, and (ii) the TGBp3 protein had two extra amino acids in the C-terminal region.