Proposal of a Citrus translational genomic approach for early and infield detection of Flavescence dorée in Vitis

Abstract

Flavescence dorée (FD) is one of the most widely known grapevine yellows disease and one of the most unabated worldwide in the viticulture sector. In this paper, we outline a strategy for developing an integrated system of technologies to enable rapid, early disease FD detection and diagnosis. We propose the deployment of a newly developed sensor device, the differential mobility spectrometer (DMS), which has shown positive results with a similar vector-borne disease in Citrus. We have previously demonstrated that the gas chromatograph DMS (GC/DMS) can distinguish various citrus diseases, and the system may also allow detection of volatile organic compound (VOC) signals from a tree of other plant systems of unknown health status. This would be achieved by comparing it with the expected VOC profile analysis of healthy or infected trees for health status determination. We can map regions in the GC/DMS signal to gas chromatography mass spectrometry data, thus allowing for deconvolution of specific GC/DMS signatures. We showed that RNA-seq will allow identifying genes involved in volatile pathways (terpenoids, phenylpropanoids, and mevalonate pathways) and could be used to guide the DMS use for the discovery of new biomarkers.