Characterization of a flowering cherry strain of Cherry necrotic rusty mottle virus.

The host range and complete nucleotide sequences of two Cherry necrotic rusty mottle virus (CNRMV) isolates (FC4 and FC5) infecting flowering cherry accessions imported from Japan are described. Of the plants tested, cherry, peach, apricot and almond became infected, but only sweet cherry cv. 'Canindex', Nanking cherry and apricot cv. 'Tilton' showed a mild foliar mottle. The genomic sequences of CNRMV-FC4 and CNRMV-FC5 are 8,430 and 8,429 nt in length, excluding the 3' poly (A) tail. They contain seven open reading frames encoding for a putative virus replicase, "triple gene block" proteins, a coat protein and two proteins with unknown functions. The two CNRMV-FC isolates share 96% identity in the genomic sequences, and their genome organizations are virtually identical to that of a German CNRMV isolate (CNRMV-GER). However, they differ from CNRMV-GER by 14% in the overall nucleotide sequence and 2% (ORF2) to 30% (ORF5a) in the derived amino acid sequences of individual gene products.