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 ...

Late blight (LB) caused by the oomycete Phytophthora infestans continues to thwart global tomato production, while only few resistant cultivars have been introduced locally. In order to gain from the released tomato germplasm with LB resistance, we compared the 5-year field performance of LB resistance in several tomato cultigens, with the results of controlled conditions testing (i.e., detache...

Phytohormones such as salicylic acid (SA), ethylene (ET) and jasmonic acid (JA) play key roles in plant defense following pathogen attack. Involvement of these hormones in plant susceptibility following Fusarium oxysporum (Fo) infection has mostly been studied in Arabidopsis thaliana. However, Fo causes vascular wilt disease in a broad range of crops, including tomato (Solanum lycopersicum). Su...

Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000 is a pathogen of tomato and Arabidopsis that injects virulence effector proteins into host cells via a type III secretion system (TTSS). TTSS-deficient mutants have a Hrp- phenotype, that is, they cannot elicit the hypersensitive response (HR) in non-host plants or pathogenesis in host plants. Mutations in effector genes typically have weak virulence pheno...

The work reported here evaluates whether bacteria populating arid and salty environments can confer resistance in tomato and pepper plants to water stress. Plant growth-promoting bacteria that have ACC deaminase activity were isolated from soil samples taken from the Arava region of southern Israel. One of these strains, Achromobacter piechaudii ARV8 [Mayak et al., Plant growth-promoting bacter...

Ethylene synthesis in vegetative tissues is thought to be controlled by indoleacetic acid (IAA). However, ethylene synthesis in the diageotropica (dgt) mutant of tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.) was much less sensitive to IAA than in the normal variety (VFN8). Yet, mechanical wounding stimulated ethylene production by the mutant. The dgt tomato provides an opportunity to study the regulat...

Male fertility in flowering plants depends on proper cellular differentiation in anthers. Meiosis and tapetum development are particularly important processes in pollen production. In this study, we showed that the tomato male sterile (ms10(35)) mutant of cultivated tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) exhibited dysfunctional meiosis and an abnormal tapetum during anther development, resulting in no p...

We isolated the 5’ upstream promoter regions of the fruit-type sucrose synthase (SS) gene from tomato and Japanese pear by inverse PCR. The 5’ region of the tomato SS gene (TOMSSF) contained an intron approximately 1.6 kbp long in the 5’untranslated region, whereas the equivalent 5’ region in the Japanese pear SS gene (PypSUS1) had no intron. Each region was fused to the β-glucuronidase (GUS) g...

Seedlings of tomato fruit ripening mutants were screened for their ability to respond to ethylene. Ethylene induced the triple response in etiolated hypocotyls of all tomato ripening mutants tested except for one, Never ripe (Nr). Our results indicated that the lack of ripening in this mutant is caused by ethylene insensitivity. Segregation analysis indicated that Nr-associated ethylene insensi...