Abstract
Pepino mosaic virus (PepMV) has caused great concern in the greenhouse tomato industry after it was found causing a new disease in tomato in 1999. The objective of this paper is to investigate alternative hosts and compare important biological characteristics of the three PepMV strains occurring in Europe when tested under different environmental conditions. To this end we compared the infectivity and symptom development of three, well characterized isolates belonging to three different PepMV strains, EU-tom, Ch2 and US1, by inoculating them on tomato, possible alternative host plants in the family Solanaceae and selected test plants. The inoculation experiments were done in 10 countries from south to north in Europe. The importance of alternative hosts among the solanaceous crops and the usefulness of test plants in the biological characterization of PepMV isolates are discussed. Our data for the three strains tested at 10 different European locations with both international and local cultivars showed that eggplant is an alternative host of PepMV. Sweet pepper is not an important host of PepMV, but potato can be infected when the right isolate is matched with a specific cultivar. Nicotiana occidentalis 37B is a useful indicator plant for PepMV studies, since it reacts with a different symptomatology to each one of the PepMV strains.
Highlights
Pepino mosaic virus (PepMV) was first reported in Europe in the late 1990s (Wright and Mumford 1999; van der Vlugt et al 2000), and has been regarded as a threat to tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) crops in several European countries ever since
The pest risk analysis (PRA) issued in 2010 (Werkman and Sansford 2010) which resulted from the EU FP6 funded PEPEIRA project, lists the occurrence of PepMV in tomato crops in several European countries: Austria, Belgium, Canary Islands, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine and the United Kingdom
Virus inoculation experiments with test plants will always depend on several variables: the virus strain, the genetic variant of the test plant, individual variation between plants and environmental conditions such as the amount of light, temperature and time of the year
Summary
Pepino mosaic virus (PepMV) was first reported in Europe in the late 1990s (Wright and Mumford 1999; van der Vlugt et al 2000), and has been regarded as a threat to tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) crops in several European countries ever since. PepMV was first described infecting pepino (S. muricatum) in Peru (Jones et al 1980), and as such was neither regarded as a serious pathogen nor as an emerging one for other crop species This scene, changed in 1999 when PepMV was detected infecting tomato crops in the main tomato growing areas in the Netherlands and Great Britain (Wright and Mumford 1999; van der Vlugt et al 2000). PepMV has been reported from Mexico (Ling and Zhang 2011), Greece (Efthimiou et al 2011) and South Africa (Charmichael et al 2011)
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