Abstract
The Northern Australia Quarantine Strategy (NAQS) is a biosecurity initiative operated by the Australian federal government’s Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment (DAWE). It is unique worldwide because it deals specifically with the potential arrival via unregulated pathways of exotic threats from overseas in a vast and sparsely populated region. It aims to protect the nation’s animal- and plant-based production industries, as well as the environment, from incursions of organisms from countries that lie immediately to the north. These are diseases, pests, and weeds present in these countries that are currently either absent from, or under active containment in, Australia and may arrive by natural or human-assisted means. This review article focuses on the plant viruses and virus-like diseases that are most highly targeted by the NAQS program. It presents eight pathogen species/group entries in the NAQS A list of target pathogens, providing an overview of the historical and current situation, and collates some new data obtained from surveillance activities conducted in northern Australia and collaborative work overseas.
Highlights
IntroductionPublisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
Southeast Asian strains of this virus are regarded as a major threat to Australia’s peanut production industry as they cause significant losses, with peanut yield losses of over 50% demonstrated in Indonesia [15]
Northern Australia Quarantine Strategy (NAQS) has implemented an ongoing program of collecting possible symptomatic peanut and other legume leaf samples on surveys conducted both in PNG
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. To address this threat, NAQS has implemented an ongoing program of collecting possible symptomatic peanut and other legume leaf samples on surveys conducted both in PNG and Far North Queensland. They have been indexed to determine if they are infected with viruses in the peanut stripe strain group of BCMV. RNA was extracted from ELISA-positive samples, and from some samples not initially screened serologically in later years, and subject to a potyvirus group-specific reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test This was followed by DNA sequence and phylogenetic analysis to determine any relationship to the peanut stripe strain of BCMV. A spin off from this has become a broader legume potyvirus diversity and distribution study which is currently in progress
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