Complete nucleotide sequences of the RNAS 2 of German isolates of Grapevine fanleaf and Arabis mosaic nepoviruses

The RNAs 2 of an Arabis mosaic virus (ArMV) and a grapevine fanleaf virus ( GFLV) isolate, originating from South West of Germany near Neustadt an der Weinstrasse (NW), were sequenced. They are 3820 and 3775 nucleotides long r espectively, and both contain one open reading frame encoding a polypeptide of 1110 amino acids. Their 5' non-coding regions contain conserved and rep eated sequences, which are able to form stem-loop structures. Nucleotide se quence comparisons between the Full-length RNAs 2 revealed homology levels of 84 and 82% between the ArMV-NW and the ArMV-L and -U, respectively, 90% between GFLV-NW and GFLV-F13, and 72% between ArMV-NW and GFLV-NW. Amino ac id sequence comparisons showed that the greatest difference was found betwe en the 2A proteins of the different ArMV isolates, the 2A protein of the Ar MV-NW showing more similarity to the 2A protein of GFLV-NW than to those of ArMV-L2 or -U2. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.