Occurrence of blueberry leaf mottle virus (Nepovirus myrtilli) in Türkiye

Abstract Blueberry leaf mottle virus (BLMoV) is a highly destructive agent in blueberry production, and entire crop can be lost in some cultivars. In this study, 316 samples from several provinces of Türkiye were tested by both ELISA and RT-PCR using virus-specific primers. Results showed that 1.26% of the tested plants were infected by DAS-ELISA, whereas 2.50% of the samples were infected by RT-PCR for BLMoV. Although multiple alignments of nucleotide sequences with corresponding sequences from GenBank showed 93.6–98.2% identity with the two BLMoV isolates available in the GenBank from the USA, identity range was 94.5–100% between Turkish isolates. To our best of knowledge, this is the first report of BLMoV on blueberry in Türkiye and outside of North America and Canada.