In September 1997, leaf curling and yellowing were observed on tomato plants on a farm on the south coast of La Reunion, a French island in the Mascarenes archipelago. Based on the similarities of the symptoms caused by geminiviruses on tomato, the diagnosis was oriented towards the detection of a geminivirus. Using degenerate primers designed to amplify a region of the A component of most of the begomoviruses (formerly sub-group 111 geminiviruses), a 500 base pair PCR product was obtained with a diseased plant, but not with a healthy looking one. Based on sequence similarities, it was shown that the detected geminivirus was an isolate of the tomato yellow leaf curl virus from Israel (TYLCV-IL).