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Plants’ secondary metabolism is an important source of medicinal and industrial products. Even though natural ecosystems are still the most important font of this kind of substance, excessive harvesting of spontaneous flora can act as a direct cause of biodiversity loss. Different technologies are used for in vitro production which, in addition to being useful for safeguarding biodiversity, make available to industry substances that are difficult to produce in vivo. Moreover, the growing demand for secondary metabolites encourages the use of new biotechnology tools to create new, more productive in vitro transgenic plant cultures.

Grapevine virus G (GVG) and grapevine virus H (GVH) (genus Vitivirus) are recently discovered viruses. Analysis of 38 samples from Sardinian grapevine cultivars for the presence of GVG and GVH was carried out using RT-PCR. All samples were also tested for grapevine Pinot gris virus (GPGV) using RT-PCR, and for grapevine leafroll virus -1, -2 and -3, grapevine virus A (GVA) and B (GVB), arabis mosaic virus (ArMV), grapevine fanleaf virus (GFLV) and grapevine fleck virus (GFkV) using multiplex RT-PCR. GVG was confirmed in four vines, and GVH was detected in only one sample. In phylogenetic analyses of the coat protein (CP) region, the Sardinian GVG isolates clustered separately from isolates from Croatia and New Zealand. The Sardinian GVH isolate clustered with most sequences from other countries, but with greater affinity to isolates from California (USA) for the CP region, whereas it clustered with isolates from Croatia in the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) region. In addition to GVG and GVH, many samples were coinfected with GVA, viruses from the leafroll complex, and GPGV. This is the first record of GVG and GVH occurring in Italy.

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