Comparison of Iflavirus Diversity in Agricultural and Forest Pest Lepidoptera

Iflavirus Diversity of Lepidoptera

Abstract

Iflaviridae is a novel and important family of viruses in the Picornavirales order that infects invertebrates. Iflaviruses are non-enveloped, linear, positive single-stranded RNA viruses. The importance of iflaviruses in agriculture and forestry is twofold, because these viruses, both cause economic loss by making insects such as honey bees and silkworm ill and prevent economic loss by making agricultural and forest pest insects ill. Therefore, iflaviruses contain highly interesting isolates that infect both beneficial and harmful insects in agriculture. Its genome structure, like most RNA viruses, has a very small genome size (8.8-10 kb), with a single open reading frame in the entire genome. The genomes of 14 infective iflaviruses that infect agricultural and forest pest insects from different countries have been analyzed so far. In this study, the similarity relationship between these 14 viruses, whose complete genomes are available, was analyzed according to the complete sequence of the polyprotein. The results showed that the virus isolates obtained from forest pest insects were closely related to each other. Similarly, it was revealed that the iflaviruses obtained from insects that damage agricultural products are more similar to each other. In addition, the results from this study support previous studies on adding a new genus to the Iflaviridae family, which has only one genus.