Until 2007 the only place this virus was known was in the United States, in particular in the state of Florida. In 2007, the virus was identified in a new host in Florida and it was partially sequenced for the first time. When the sequence of 247 base pairs was compared to other potyvirus sequences in GenBank it matched a virus found in Taiwan tentatively called "Sunflower chlorotic spot virus" (SCSV) whose sequence had been deposited in the GenBank in 2001 (GenBank Accession No. AF538686). The nucleotide sequences of the two were 94% identical and the deduced amino acid sequences were 98% identical. At the time it was suggested that SCSV and BiMoV were one and the same.