Ongoing geographical spread of Tomato yellow leaf curl virus

Batsirai Mabvakure, Darren P. Martin, Simona Kraberger, Leendert Cloete, Sharon van Brunschot, Andrew D.W. Geering, John E. Thomas, Kaveh Bananej, Jean-Michel Lett, Pierre Lefeuvre, Arvind Varsani, Gordon W. Harkins

Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) seriously impacts tomato production throughout tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world. It has a broad geographical distribution and continues to spread to new regions in the Indian and Pacific Oceans including Australia, New Caledonia and Mauritius. We undertook a temporally-scaled, phylogeographic analysis of all publicly available, full genome sequences of TYLCV, together with 70 new genome sequences from Australia, Iran and Mauritius. This revealed that whereas epidemics in Australia and China likely originated through multiple independent viral introductions from the East-Asian region around Japan and Korea, the New Caledonian epidemic was seeded by a variant from the Western Mediterranean region and the Mauritian epidemic by a variant from the neighbouring island of Reunion. Finally, we show that inter-continental scale movements of TYLCV to East Asia have, at least temporarily, ceased, whereas long-distance movements to the Americas and Australia are probably still ongoing.