Molecular Identification of Begomovirus Causing Leaf Curl Disease in Potato Plant through PCR

Diseases caused by geminiviruses have long been recognized as a limitation to the cultivation of several important crops, including maize, cassava; bean, squash, potato and tomato, in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. More recently, geminivirus diseases, particularly those transmitted by whiteflies, have become an even greater threat to agriculture due to the appearance of a new and more aggressive whitefly biotype. This has renewed interest in the study of geminivirus pathogenesis and epidemiology and has stimulated work on the development of virus-resistant crop plants. Recognition of disease symptoms in field samples was done and total genomic DNA was isolated from the diseased and healthy samples. The viral genome was amplified using specific two sets of primers CP and ROJAS, was checked by agarose gel electrophoresis resulted in no amplification in case of CP and 1.2kb DNA fragments with ROJAS primer gave the confirmation of presence of DNA-A. The evidence for the presence of DNA-A was obtained from PCR amplification.