Biological and genetic characterization of Physostegia chlorotic mottle virus in Europe based 2 on host range, location, and time

Application of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies enabled the first 30 identification of Physostegia chlorotic mottle virus (PhCMoV) in 2018 in Austria. Subsequently,PhCMoV was detected in Germany and Serbia on tomatoes showing severe fruit mottling and ripening anomalies. We report here how pre-publication data-sharing resulted in an international collaboration across eight laboratories in five countries enabling an in-depth characterization of PhCMoV. The independent studies converged toward its recent identification in eight additional European countries and confirmed its presence in samples collected 20 ago (2002). The naturalplant host range was expanded from two species to nine species across seven families, and we confirmed the association of PhCMoV presence with severe fruit symptoms on economically important crops such as tomato, eggplant, and cucumber. Mechanical inoculations of selected isolates in greenhouse established the causality of the symptoms on a new indexing host range. In addition, phylogenetic analysis showed a low genomic variation across the 29 near-complete genomes sequences available. Furthermore, a strong selection pressure within a specific ecosystem was suggested by nearly identical sequences recovered from different host plants through time. Overall, this study describes the European distribution of PhCMoV on multiple plant hosts, including economically important crops which the virus can cause severe fruit symptoms for. This work demonstrates how to efficiently improve knowledge on an emergent pathogen by sharing HTS data, and provides a solid knowledge foundation for further studies on plant rhabdoviruses