Detection and Classification of Barley Yellow Dwarf Virus Strains Using RT-PCR

Barley Yellow Dwarf Virus (BYDV), an aphid-borne luteovirus, is a major plant pathogenic disease causing a huge economic loss in the grain production of a wide range of Gramineae species throughout the world. It has been recently reported that BYDV also occurred frequently in wheat field of Korea. Here, we performed to develop the detection and classification methods of BYDV strains that were accomplished by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Since there are high variations among BYDV strains, three pairs of primers were designed to detect BYDV strains such as PAV (Vic-PAV and CN-PAV) and MAV (primer A) simultaneously, specifically Vic-PAV(primer B), and MAV (primer C) based on the genomic RNA sequences of BYDV strains previously published. The validity of the primers was confirmed using several BYDV strains obtained from CIMMYT. Though three BYDV strains were able to be detected using primer A, PCR products were not distinguished between two PAV strains. It was possible to separate them with a restriction enzyme, EcoRI, whose restriction site was present in the amplified DNA fragment from Vic-PAV, but not from CN-PAV.