A naturally occurring deleted form of RNA 2 of Potato mop-top virus.

A spontaneous deletion in RNA 2 of Potato mop-top virus (PMTV) was identified by RT-PCR. The deletion occurred reproducibly during manual passage of two isolates of PMTV and during fungal inoculation of plants with viruliferous soil. The borders of the deletion were conserved in all instances and sequence analyses showed that a contiguous segment of 2113 nucleotides was deleted internally from the genomic RNA 2, leaving the 5'- and 3'-terminal sequences. RT-PCR experiments also showed that the deletion was present in preparations of PMTV particles.