Vein Necrosis Disease in Japanese Persimmon (Diospyros kaki) in Samsun Province and detection of Persimmon cryptic virus

Trees showing symptoms of  vein necrosis on both sides of the leaf blades were observed in two persimmon orchards in Samsun province in June 2015. Leaf and shoot samples were taken from these symptomatic trees, which were highly prevalent in the orchards. Following double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) analysis, a 144 bp fragment, corresponding to the partial coat protein region (CP) of  the deltapartitivirus Persimmon cryptic virus (PeCV) was amplified using RT-PCR specific primer pair. The amplicon was cloned into pSC-A-amp/kan and custom-sequenced. The sequence data was deposited into GenBank under KT962117.  Blast analysis revealed that PeCV Samsun isolate obtained from S3 symptomatic accession shared approximately 96% nucleotide identity with the Italian isolate SSPI (HE805114). Furthermore, samples were tested for the cytorhabdovirus Persimmon virus A (PeVA), however none of the samples were found to be infected. In this study, a relationship between vein necrosis and PeCV could not be determined, and the etiology of vein necrosis disease still needs to be investigated in the future.