First report of Maize yellow mosaic virus (MaYMV) infecting sugarcane in India and its molecular characterization

Maize yellow mosaic virus (MaYMV) was first reported in the field-grown maize crop showing mosaic and foliar yellowing symptoms in Yunnan provinces of China during the year 2016. Since then, its widespread occurrence has been reported in many countries of Africa, China, and South America in maize crop and other related hosts, sugarcane, sorghum, and Panicum sp. In India, we studied the prevalence of the virus in sugarcane during 2019-2020 by RT-PCR assays using the MaYMV specific primers designed from the consensus ORF 3 and ORF 4 regions. Our studies confirmed MaYMV infection in 14.15% of the sugarcane leaf samples in RT-PCR assays followed by sequencing. The pairwise multiple sequence alignment of all the 15 consensus sequences of this study from sugarcane had shown the highest nucleotide similarities with 97.4% to 100% among themselves as well as to other MaYMV sequences of maize from Africa and China and mainly, all the Saccharum isolates of China. In phylogenetic analysis, all the isolate sequences from this study and others retrieved from GenBank representing all the reported countries clustered together in a single clade. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first and new report of MaYMV infecting sugarcane in India, which necessitates more focused research on mixed infections of sugarcane viral diseases in perspectives of management.