engleski

Comparison of PLMVd isolates from Montenegro and Croatia

In the survey conducted on various stone and pome fruit trees in Montenegro in 2020, RNA was extracted (RNeasy, Qiagen) from leaf tissue of 21 samples. In order to perform screening for the economically most important fruit tree viroids, RT-PCR was performed on extracts from plum, peach, nectarine (five of each), three pear, two apple and one sour cherry symptomatic trees by using HSVd, PLMVd, CEVd and apscaviroid (ASSVd, PBCVd, ADFVd) primers. An RNA extract obtained in 2004 from a Croatian nectarine (Prunus persica var. nucipersica) ‘Perfect Delight’ grafted on P. persica was used as a PLMVd positive control since the viroid had already been proven previously in this sample. RT-PCR results have shown that most of the surveyed trees did not harbor viroids. Two peach and a nectarine sample from Ćemovsko polje near Podgorica seemed to be infected with HSVd, while PLMVd was detected in a mixed infection in one of those peaches (‘Maria Marta’) of Italian origin planted in 2000. All obtained amplicons were Sanger sequenced bidirectionaly. As the Croatian PLMVd isolate came from a nectarine imported from Italy that had been planted in 2002, we compared the sequences of these two isolates. BLAST analysis have shown that the Montenegrin isolate has a distinct PLMVd sequence that has not been reported previously in NCBI, while the Croatian isolate has shown 100% sequence identity with already published PLMVd sequences from Turkey, Greece and China. Further analyses are in progress. Nonetheless, preliminary results suggest that diverse PLMVd variants probably existed in peach growing areas of these two countries decades ago. This calls for more detailed analyses of PLMVd historical and current isolates in both countries and their impact on the fruit production.

Peach latent mosaic viroid, PLMVd, stone fruits

Suradnja na međunarodnom projektu ICGEB CRP/MNE19-01 koji vodi J. Zindović integrirana s HRZZ projektom NanoPhyto ( voditeljica D. Škorić).