[1][2][3][4] The virus causes mild to severe leaf malformation, and bulb reduction up to sixty percent has been observed in garlic.

[6] OYDV is the first potyvirus found which has natural deletion mutants lacking the N-terminal region of helper-component proteinase (HC-Pro).

Garlic plants grown commercially are generally co-infected with both the normal and attenuated isolates.

[7] RNA silencing suppressor activities in isolates, which lack the long stretch of the N-terminal amino acids (~ 100 residues) in their HC-Pro gene, are observed to be low.

[8] Isolates with complete HC-Pro sequences were non-persistently transmitted by aphids on their own, while the isolates with short HC-Pros (OYDV-S) were only aphid transmissible when they were co-infected with leek yellow stripe virus (LYSV), another potyvirus that mostly infects Allium spp.