1. OSAMAH NADHIM ALISAWI - Department of Plant Protection, College of Agriculture, University of Kufa, Najaf, Iraq.
2. RUBAR HUSSEIN M. SALIH - Department of Biotechnology and Crop Science, College of Agricultural Sciences, University of
Sulaimani, Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan Region-Iraq.
3. PAT HESLOP-HARRISON - Department of Genetics and Genome Biology, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom.
Endogenous viral elements of the Caulimoviridae family have been registered in different plant families as integrants. As one of the Asteraceae family, Taraxacum has been studied here to find endogenous pararetroviruses (EPRVs), including its three different agamospecies genomes. Three different agamospecies genomes of Taraxacum O978, A978, and S3, have been sequenced using nextgeneration sequencing, and then analyzed by bioinformatics techniques to search endogenous pararetroviral sequences within each examined genome. In the three genomic sequences, two caulimovirus-like sequences were found, one belonging to the Caulimovirus genus and is named as Caulimovirus-TOf, while the second was from the Florendovirus genus and was named ToffiV. The length of Caulimovirus-TOf was 6976 bp with three open reading frames encoding protein domains of cauli-D, peptidase-A3, RT-LTR, RVT, and RNaseH. Cauliflower mosaic virus and Caulimovirus-TOf shared peptidase, RT, and RH domains in 62% pairwise identity based on phylogeny analyses. The Florendovirus sequence has been reversely extracted with a length of 8131 bp and three open reading frames that encode movement protein, RT-LTR, RVT, and RNaseH. The O978 genome showed a high rate of EPRVs than the other two, indicating a very accessible genome and possible DNA marker based on widely fluctuating ratios of both integrants.
Taraxacum genomes, Endogenous pararetroviruses, Genomics, Caulimovirus-TOf, ToffiV, Next-generation sequencing, Bioinformatics techniques.