Coat protein gene sequence analysis of potato virus X and potato virus Y: conserved regions to design gene silencing cassette.

Potato virus X(PVX) and Potato virus Y(PVY) are two of the three most prevalent viruses that cause significant yield declines in potato. Twenty-seven PVX and thirty-seven PVY accessions were analyzed for nucleotide sequence variation of the coat protein gene. The average and variance of genetic distance for PVX were estimated at 0.118 and 0.004 and 0.118 and 0.005 for PVY using the neighbour joining method. Results of phylogenetic trees and their certification via stepwise discriminant analysis led us to classify of PVX sequences in four groups and PVY sequences in three groups. One purpose of this project was to determine suitable conserved regions to make of gene silencing constructs. Length of identified conserved regions were enough to silence of the virus coat protein genes on infected plants, many of which were located consequently with short gap spacers. In this term, some of groups were divided into subgroups to obtain conserved regions under minimum length of25 nt, enough length to design specific diagnostic-primers.