Occurrence of blueberry leaf mottle virus (<i>Nepovirus myrtilli</i>) in Türkiye

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 T & uuml;rkiye 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 T & uuml;rkiye and outside of North America and Canada.