the first report of the chilli leaf curl virus and its beta satellite from bell peppers and tomatoes from the central provinces of iran

during a survey in 2021 a number of pepper and tomato plant samples with the begomovirus-like symptoms such as crinkled and curling leaves were collected from pepper and tomato greenhouses in three central provinces of iran (yazd, isfahan and kerman). some weed species occurring within proximity to the greenhouse cultivated tomato crops were also sampled. to identify the begomovirus infection in the collected samples, total dna samples were extracted using a ctab-based method and subjected to polymerase chain reaction (pcr)using the begomovirus degenerate primer pair bc primer and primer181v (anfoka et al. 2005). this primer pair produced an amplicon of about 500 bp from pepper (yazd and kerman), tomato (yazd) and puppet (yazd) samples. multiple alignment of the resulted nucleotide sequences showed that the isolates share maximum and minimum identities of 97.8 to 88.4% respectively with nucleotide sequences of chili leaf curl virus (chilcv) isolates reported from oman (97.83%), pakistan (97.83%), and india (97.64%) while they showed less than 80.2% similarity with other geminiviruses. furthermore, a 1351bp fragment of dna-β satellite genome was successfully amplified from pepper and tomato isolates (collected in molabashi and dehaghan regions in yazd and isfahan provinces respectively), using specific beta-satellite primer pair beta01 / beta02 (cui et al., 2004). alignment of the obtained sequences showed a very close homology to the beta satellite (tolcb) associated with iranian isolate of tolcv, (mn175237.1) (benanej et al. 2019).