Genetics of novel leaf curl virus disease resistant pepper genotypes and antioxidative profile analysis of their progenies

Abstract

Pepper/Chilli leaf curl virus disease (PepLCVD/ChiLCVD) is the most destructive disease of pepper that seriously reduced pepper production. The LCVD is transmitted by vector whitefly (Bemisia tabaci) so efficiently that even single whitefly is able to transmit the virus. The effective way to manage the LCVD in pepper is to introduce LCVD resistance into agronomically desired cultivars, but the lack of resistant sources is a major hurdle in this technique. So with this objective, we identified new resistant sources against LCVD using astringent artificial screening techniques. The genetics of these new sources was confirmed using artificial inoculation methods on parental lines and their progenies that developed by using susceptible bell pepper genotype PAU SM-1. The progenies of crosses S-343 and SL 475 with susceptible genotype reveal monogenic dominant control of LCVD resistance while progenies of crosses SL 492 and JL 282 reveal monogenic recessive gene control for LCVD resistance. Moreover, antioxidative and biochemical parameter analysis demonstrate high levels of peroxidase (PO), polyphenol oxidase (PPO), ascorbate peroxidase (APX), phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL), tyrosine ammonia lyase (TAL) and superoxide dismutase (SOD) and phenolic compounds in leaves of resistant plants than susceptible plants. Furthermore, all the studied traits and treatments were subjected to principal component analysis (PCA), correlation, and clustering analysis. The first three PCA components describe 70.55% variation for both studied traits and treatments. Hence, the newly identified sources could be further used for resistant breeding programs, and their antioxidative profile data could be used as biochemical markers for studying further plant-virus interactions.