The virion has helical symmetry and a deeply grooved, highly hydrated surface and is made of a single-stranded positive-sense RNA genome of approximately 6.4 kb.

Virus indexing and limited generation production of potato, which starts from disease-free tissue culture plantlets, has nearly eliminated this virus from many countries' potato supply.

Solanum tuberosum, Lycopersicon esculentum and Nicotiana tabacum.

[1] Chapman et al. 1992 introduced the use of transgenic PVX as a plant transformation vector.

[2] It has since been used by Kumagai et al. 1995 in the discovery of what is now known as virus-induced gene silencing, by Thomas et al. 2001 to improve Kumagai's process, by De Kock et al. 2004 to investigate Nicotiana's Cf proteins and Cf genes and their production of host resistance responsive to pathogen extracellular protein 2 (ECP2) (and by others to investigate various other host–pathogen interactions in S. tuberosum, L. esculentum and N. tabacum)[1] and by Tameling et al. 2007 to investigate plant nucleotide binding leucine-rich repeats (NB-LRRs).