Genome structure and phylogenetic analysis of lettuce infectious yellows virus, a whitefly-transmitted, bipartite closterovirus.

We report the complete nucleotide sequences of lettuce infectious yellows virus (LIYV) RNAs 1 and 2. LIYV RNA 1 is 8118 nucleotides and includes three open reading frames (ORFs). Computer-assisted analysis of LIYV RNA 1 ORFs identified domains for a papain-like protease, methyltransferase (MTR), RNA helicase (HEL), and RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp). We suggest that the RdRp domain is expressed independently of the other replication-associated domains via a + 1 ribosomal frameshift. Amino acid sequences of the MTR, HEL, and RdRp show highly significant similarity to the homologous sequences from other closteroviruses and lower similarity to the respective proteins of tobamoviruses, tobraviruses, hordeiviruses, bromoviruses, and furoviruses. LIYV RNA 2 is 7193 nucleotides and includes six ORFs. These ORFs include a gene array that is characteristic of the closteroviruses: ORFs encoding a small membrane protein, a homologue of the HSP70 family of chaperone proteins, a protein whose function is unknown, the coat protein, and a diverged duplicate of the coat protein. LIYV is distinguished from the monopartite closteroviruses in the following ways: its genome consists of two RNAs, the positions of the coat protein gene and its diverged duplicate are reversed, and LIYV includes ORFs that are unrelated to ORFs found in other closteroviruses.