Pome fruits virome characterization

As part of a pilot study on germplasm collections, leaves were collected from more than 100 apple (Malus domestica) and pear (Pyrus communis) trees in the germplasm collection of the CRA-W in Belgium between June 2019 and June 2023. Double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) and total RNA were extracted from the collected leaf tissue, and the extracted nucleic acids were submitted to high-throughput sequencing (HTS). After read assembly using SPAdes Genome Assembler, viral contigs belonging to various apple and pear viruses were identified by BLASTn against the GenBank nucleotide database.