Volume 3 Article informations NGS Data screening of potato virus Y infection: The near-complete sequence of Tunisian PVY isolate characterized from potato leaves sample Ahmed Ben Hafsa a,b, Nesrine Nabi a,b, Mohammed Salem Zellama a,b and Maher Chaouachi 2 Abstract Potato is one of the most important crops growing in Tunisia. Potato virus Y (PVY) has been reported as one of the major viruses touching these crops. In this study, the nearly full-length nucleotide sequence of one Tunisian PVY isolate was determined using next generation sequencing (NGS). The genome of Tunisian PVY isolate was 9,657 nucleotides long encoding all potyviral cistrons. Phylogenetic analysis showed that the Tunisian isolate clustered with European recombinant NTN isolates. To the best of our knowledge, our analysis provides the first demonstration of genomic structure of Tunisian PVY strain and highlights the importance of recombination in the evolution of PVY. NGS Data screening of PVY infecting potato sample revealed a huge diversity of putative viral genomic sequences. More than 90% of the assembled contigs shared less than 70% identity with genomes from known mycoviruses species according to the BLASTx results, suggesting that they probably represent new viral species in these families. Interestingly, known viral infection like as PVY could curiously hide other unknown’s agents which could be the subject of further study on mycoviruses. Keywords: Potato virus Y, NGS, Genome, Recombination, Tunisia