Flue-cured tobacco confirmed as a reservoir host plant for Tomato yellow leaf curl virus by agro-inoculation and Bemisia tabaci MED-mediated transmission.

Meng Li,Xiao-Juan Li,Yun-Lin Su

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0190013

Meng Li, Xiao-Juan Li + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190013

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Dec 22, 2017
Citations: 2	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Zhengzhou University of Light Industry

Abstract

Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) causes great losses in tomato production. In addition to tomato, TYLCV infects many crops or weeds as alternative hosts. These alternative hosts may serve as reservoirs for TYLCV survival and spread. Here, we tested the capability of cultivated, flue-cured tobacco to act as a reservoir host plant for TYLCV. TYLCV DNA was detected in nine flue-cured tobacco cultivars inoculated with an infectious TYLCV clone, although no visible symptoms developed on TYLCV-infected tobacco plants. The percentage of whiteflies with viral DNA increased with an increasing acquisition access period (AAP) and reached 100% after a 12 h AAP on infected tobacco plants. Using infected tobacco plants as virus resources, TYLCV was capable of being transmitted to tobacco and tomato plants by whiteflies, and typical symptoms of TYLCV infection were observed on infected tomato plants but not on infected tobacco plants. Our results suggest that flue-cured tobacco can serve as a reservoir host plant for TYLCV and may play an important role in the spread of TYLCV epidemics in China.

Highlights

Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) causes huge losses in tomato production worldwide [1, 2]
Previous studies have shown that TYLCV DNA can be detected in whiteflies with a minimum acquisition access period (AAP) of 5–30 min on infected tomato plants [30, 37,38,39]
Our data showed that TYLCV DNA was detected in whiteflies after a 15 min AAP on infected tobacco plants, suggesting TYLCV was capable of being readily acquired from infected tobacco plants by B. tabaci MED (15 min, 10% whitefly were found to be associated with TYLCV, Table 3)

Summary

Introduction

Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) causes huge losses in tomato production worldwide [1, 2]. TYLCV has been detected in tomato and in several other crops and ornamental plants including tobacco [9,10,11], common bean [12], corchorus [13], cowpea [14], eustoma [15], pepper [16,17,18], squash [19], and many weeds [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29] in field surveys.

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