Received: 14 April 2021 Revised: 10 June 2021 Accepted: 10 June 2021
DOI: 10.1002/ndr2.12019
NEW DISEASE REPORT
First report of Hibiscus latent Singapore virus infecting hibiscus in
Peninsular Malaysia
M.S.M. Yusop
1
Z.A. Mohamed-Hussein
1, 2
H. Bunawan
1
1
Institute of Systems Biology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi Selangor 43600, Malaysia
2
Department of Applied Physics, Faculty of Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, Selangor 43600, Malaysia
Correspondence
H. Bunawan, Institute of Systems Biology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi Selangor, 43600, Malaysia.
Email: hamidun.bunawan@ukm.edu.my
FIGURE 1 Leaf wrinkling symptoms on different individual
hibiscus plants
Hibiscus rosa-sinensis is an ornamental plant widely cultivated in the
tropics and subtropics. The species has been dubbed the queen of trop-
ical flowers and can be found in gardens throughout these regions with
numerous varieties and hybrids available. The five-petal, red-coloured
hibiscus variety is even the national flower of Malaysia, locally called
‘Bunga Raya’ (Chin, 1988). Around March 2019, a disease symptom of
leaf wrinkling was observed on the leaves of hibiscus growing near the
Faculty of Science and Technology building in Universiti Kebangsaan
Malaysia (Figures 1–3).
Total RNA was extracted from diseased leaves of 14 individual
plants using a QIAGEN RNeasy Plant Mini Kit according to the manu-
facturer’s protocol. The RNA extracts were pooled and sent for next-
generation sequencing using the Illumina HiSeq 2500 platform (1st
BASE Sequencing Malaysia). The extracts were subjected to library
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided
the original work is properly cited.
© 2021 The Authors. New Disease Reports published by British Society for Plant Pathology and John Wiley & Sons
FIGURE 2 Non-symptomatic leaves on different healthy hibiscus
plants
FIGURE 3 Hibiscus leaf showing wrinkling symptom (left) and a
healthy leaf showing no symptoms (right)
New Dis Rep. 2021;1–3. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ndr2 1