# First report of a naturally occurring isolate of Pepper yellow vein Mali virus causing tobacco yellow leaf curl disease in Burkina Faso

Alassane Ouattara, T.A. Nana, K.H. Sogoba, K. Koïta, Pierre Lefeuvre, Jean-Michel Lett

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

► To cite this version:

Alassane Ouattara, T.A. Nana, K.H. Sogoba, K. Koïta, Pierre Lefeuvre, et al. First report of a naturally occurring isolate of Pepper yellow vein Mali virus causing tobacco yellow leaf curl disease in Burkina Faso. New Disease Reports, 2023, 48 (2), pp.e12217. 10.1002/ndr2.12217. hal-05182509

HAL Id: hal-05182509

https://hal.science/hal-05182509v1

Submitted on 23 Jul 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

# First report of a naturally occurring isolate of *Pepper yellow vein Mali virus* causing tobacco yellow leaf curl disease in Burkina Faso

A. Ouattara<fnref n="1" /> |

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

T. A. Nana<fnref n="1" />

K. H. Sogoba<fnref n="1" />

K. Koïta<fnref n="1" />

P. Lefeuvre<fnref n="2" />

J. M. Lett<fnref n="2" />

## Correspondence

A. Ouattara, Laboratoire Biosciences, Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo, 03 BP 7021, Ouagadougou 03, Burkina Faso. Email: alassane.ouattara@ujkz.bf

## Funding information

The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, Grant/Award Number: Grantn°_21-147RG/BIO/AF/AC_I-FR3240319486; The European Union (ERDF), the Conseil Régional de La Réunion and CIRAD; Make Our Planet Great Again, Grant/Award Number: MOPGA-postdoc4-4610922765

## KEYWORDS

Begomovirus, disease surveillance, MinION

Pepper yellow vein disease (PYVD) has been reported to be associated with the African monopartite begomovirus *Pepper yellow vein Mali virus* (PepYVMLV) in West Africa (Tiendrébéogo et al., 2008; Zhou et al., 2008). Recently, vegetable isolates of PepYVMLV have also been shown to be associated with a DNA-B component in Burkina Faso (Ouattara et al., 2019) and Cote d'Ivoire (Soro et al., 2021).

In September 2021, severe leaf yellowing, curling and deformation symptoms (Figure 1), resembling those of pepper yellow vein disease were observed on tobacco (*Nicotiana tabacum*) bordering pepper and tomato fields in the locality of Tabtenga in Burkina Faso. Tobacco leaves with (n = 3) and without (n = 2) symptoms were collected. The samples were tested for the presence of begomoviruses using a PCR assay with degenerate primers designed to amplify the coat protein gene of Old World begomoviruses (Séka et al., 2016) followed by direct sequencing of PCR amplicons. PCR products of the expected size were only obtained from the three diseased tobacco

plants. BLASTn analyses of the amplicon sequences (676, 687 and 694 base pairs (bp) in length; GenBank Accession Nos. OR483371 - OR483373) showed the highest pairwise identity (98 to 99%) with PepYVMLV isolates from Burkina Faso (MH778652; MH778653). To confirm these results, specific primers for the detection of both DNA-A and -B components of PepYVMLV were used for PCR testing (Ouattara et al., 2019). Both components were detected from the three diseased samples confirming the initial diagnosis. To obtain the complete sequences of DNA-A and -B components, samples were subjected to nanopore MinION sequencing as described by Ben Chehida et al. (2021). Global similarity search analysis resulted in 84/3076 and 99/3076 raw reads assigned to PepYVMLV DNA-A and DNA-B, respectively. Based on sequence assembly only one contig of 2781 bp (DNA-A component) was obtained (OR483374) with 96.7% identity to PepYVMLV isolated from Burkina Faso (MH778653, FN555171). A maximum-likelihood phylogenetic tree constructed with publicly

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2023 The Authors. *New Disease Reports* published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Society for Plant Pathology.

<footnote n="1">¹Laboratoire Biosciences, Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Ouagadougou 03, Burkina Faso</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²CIRAD, UMR PVBMT, La Réunion, France</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>**FIGURE 1** Diseased (a) and asymptomatic (b) tobacco plants (*Nicotiana tabacum*) observed around pepper and tomato fields in September 2021 in the locality of Tabtenga in Burkina Faso.</figcaption></figure>

available begomovirus genome sequences and the sequences obtained in this study (OR483371 - OR483374) confirmed the genetic relationship of the isolates of PepYVMLV from tobacco with previously characterised isolates from West Africa (Figure 2).

To our knowledge, this is the first report of PepYVMLV naturally associated with tobacco yellow leaf curl disease in Burkina Faso and globally. Our results highlight the potential existence of alternative natural hosts for PepYVMLV.

## ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by The World Academy of Sciences, Trieste, Italy (TWAS) (Grant n° 21-147 RG/BIO/AF/AC_I-FR3240319486), the European Union (ERDF), the *Conseil Régional de La Réunion* and CIRAD, and conducted on the Plant Protection Platform (3P, IBISA). Dr Ouattara is a recipient of a 12-month visiting scientist fellowship of the program Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA-postdoc4-4610922765) from the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE).
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>**FIGURE 2** Maximum likelihood phylogenetic tree inferred from the alignment of DNA-A-like sequences of begomoviruses. The names of the sequences characterized in this study are in bold; ** and * indicate full sequence and coat protein sequences obtained from nanopore MinION and Sanger sequencing, respectively; PepYVMLV, *Pepper yellow vein Mali virus*; ToLCBFV, *Tomato leaf curl Burkina Faso virus*; ToLCNmV, *Tomato leaf curl Namakeli virus*; ToLCGHV, *Tomato leaf curl Ghana virus*; ToLCMLV, *Tomato leaf curl Mali virus*; EACMV, *East Africa cassava mosaic virus*; OLCMLV, *Okra leaf curl Mali virus*; and CLCuGeV, *Cotton leaf curl Gezira virus*. The horizontal scale indicates genetic distance. The outgroups were isolates of CLCuGeV.</figcaption></figure>

ORCID

A. Ouattara https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4452-5541

REFERENCES

Ben Chehida, S., Filloux, D., Fernandez, E., Moubset, O., Hoareau, M., Julian, C. et al. (2021) Nanopore sequencing is a credible alternative to recover complete genomes of geminiviruses. *Microorganisms*, **9**, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms9050903

Ouattara, A., Tiendrébéogo, F., Lefeuvre, P., Hoareau, M., Claverie, S., Allibert, A. et al. (2019) Diversity, distribution and prevalence of vegetable-infecting geminiviruses in Burkina Faso. *Plant Pathology*, **69**, 379–392. https://doi.org/10.1111/ppa.13120

Séka, K., Ouattara, A., Assiri, K.P., Kra, K.D., Hoareau, M., Lefeuvre, P. et al. (2016) First reports of *Cotton leaf curl Gezira virus* and *Okra yellow crinkle virus* associated with okra leaf curl disease in Cote d'Ivoire. *New Disease Reports*, **34**, 8. https://doi.org/10.5197/j.2044-0588.2016.034.008

Soro, K., Agneroh, T.A. and Kouadio, K.T. (2021) Identification of eggplant (*Solanum melongena*) as a new host of begomovirus *Pepper yellow vein Mali virus* in Côte d'Ivoire. *Journal of Applied Biosciences*, **157**, 16153–16160. https://doi.org/10.35759/JABs.157.1

Tiendrébéogo, F., Traoré, E.V.S., Barro, N., Traoré, A.S., Konaté, G. and Traoré, O. (2008) Characterization of *Pepper yellow vein Mali virus* in *Capsicum* sp. in Burkina Faso. *Plant Pathology Journal*, **7**, 155–161. https://doi.org/10.3923/ppj.2008.155.161

Zhou, Y.-C., Noussourou, M., Kon, T., Rojas, M.R., Jiang, H., Chen, L.-F. et al. (2008) Evidence of local evolution of tomato-infecting begomovirus species in West Africa: characterization of tomato leaf curl Mali virus and tomato yellow leaf crumple virus from Mali. *Archives of Virology*, **153**, 693–706. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00705-008-0042-9

**How to cite this article:** Ouattara, A., Nana, T.A., Sogoba, K.H., Koïta, K., Lefeuvre, P., & Lett, J.M. (2023) First report of a naturally occurring isolate of *Pepper yellow vein Mali virus* causing tobacco yellow leaf curl disease in Burkina Faso. *New Disease Reports*, **48**, e12217.
https://doi.org/10.1002/ndr2.12217