Abstract

More than 50 viruses causing infection in members of the family Cucurbitaceae have been identified in the world so far. Because of the development of virus detection methods, new viruses are added to the known infectious cases list every day. One of the viruses recently identified is the Cucumis melo endornavirus (CmEV) which has been reported from different countries all over the world. However, no study for determination of CmEV has been done so far in Turkey. For the purpose of this study, 59 cucurbit plants showing virus and virus-like symptoms were collected from Manisa and İzmir provinces in Turkey. The samples were tested, for presence of CmEV, by reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction and CmEV infections were detected in 47 samples, of which 44 were melon (Cucumis melo Linn.), and the remaining were gherkins (C. anguria Linn.). Among the infected samples, five samples (three were melon, and two were gherkin) were chosen for sequence analysis. After evaluating the sequence analysis results, it was shown that the Turkish isolates presented 93%-99% and 93%-98% identities at the nucleotide level and 94%-99% and 91%-98% identities at the amino acid level among each other and worldwide isolates, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of CmEV in gherkin as a new host both in Turkey and worldwide.