Abstract
Late blight (LB) caused by the oomycete Phytophthora infestans continues to thwart global tomato production, while only few resistant cultivars have been introduced locally. In order to gain from the released tomato germplasm with LB resistance, we compared the 5-year field performance of LB resistance in several tomato cultigens, with the results of controlled conditions testing (i.e., detached leaflet/leaf, whole plant). In case of these artificial screening techniques, the effects of plant age and inoculum concentration were additionally considered. In the field trials, LA 1033, L 3707, L 3708 displayed the highest LB resistance, and could be used for cultivar development under Polish conditions. Of the three methods using controlled conditions, the detached leaf and the whole plant tests had the highest correlation with thefield experiments. The plant age effect on LB resistance in tomato reported here, irrespective of the cultigen tested or inoculum concentration used, makes it important to standardize the test parameters when screening for resistance. Our results help show why other reports disagree on LB resistance in tomato.
Highlights
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is the fourth most economically important crop in the world: after rice, wheat, and soybean [1,2]
Tomato germplasm exist with resistance against P. infestans [15,16,17,18,19,20]; little information is available on standardized methods for evaluating late blight (LB) resistance in tomato
In all test methods we evaluated the influence of plant developmental stage and inoculum concentration on the disease severity in four tomato cultigens with various levels of P. infestans resistance/susceptibility: West Virginia 700 (WVa 700), L 3708, LA 1033, and ‘Rumba’
Summary
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is the fourth most economically important crop in the world: after rice, wheat, and soybean [1,2]. The accession S. habrochaites LA 1033 was designated Ph - 4 and used as a LB resistance standard by several research centers [30,31,32], despite evidence of multiple QTLs conferring the trait [17,33,34,35]. Such discrepancies make it difficult for tomato breeders to use resistant germplasms
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