Flavescence dorée (FD) is a grapevine disease that afflicts several wine production areas in Europe, from Portugal to Serbia. FD is caused by a bacterium, "Candidatus Phytoplasma vitis," which is spread throughout the vineyards by a leafhopper, Scaphoideus titanus (Cicadellidae). After collection of S. titanus specimens from FD-contaminated vineyards in three different areas in the Piedmont reg...

Part of the Master Thesis of the first author. Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro. Seropédica RJ. 2008. ABSTRACT Phytoplasmas can cause yield losses in numerous crops worldwide. In Brazil, phytoplasmal diseases have been reported in plant species, distributed among 29 botanical families. Chayote witches’-broom (ChWB) is reported as one of the diseases of economic importance, associate...

Phytoplasmas are a group of insect-vectored bacteria responsible for disease in many plant species worldwide. Among the crop species affected is the economically valuable forage species lucerne. Here we provide comprehensive molecular evidence for infection in multiple lucerne plants by a phytoplasma not previously known from this plant species. This phytoplasma had a >99% genetic similarity to...

Different PCR protocols have been established for detection of European fruit trees phytoplasmas; however the majority of the procedures for extracting phytoplasma DNA are complex, time consuming, and expensive, with a risk of contamination or loss of target DNA. In present study, a crude extract preparation method previously used to detect other plant pathogens was adapted to samples from appl...

Phytoplasmas, the causal agents of numerous plant diseases, are insect-vector-transmitted, cell-wall-less bacteria descended from ancestral low-G+C-content Gram-positive bacteria in the Bacillus-Clostridium group. Despite their monophyletic origin, widely divergent phytoplasma lineages have evolved in adaptation to specific ecological niches. Classification and taxonomic assignment of phytoplas...

Murta (Ugni molinae Turcz.) and common chaura (Gaultheria phillyreifolia (Pers.) Sleumer) are native species of Chile. Plants of both species have shown over-branching like witches’ broom. The causal agents of these symptoms in many plants are phytoplasma. To verify the presence of these microorganisms, DAPI (4’,6-diamidino2-phenylindole) staining analysis and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) we...

Quantification of a plant pathogen is essential to study its population dynamic in various conditions and to relate symptom expression with pathogen concentration. Up to now, very few methods have been published to quantify phytoplasmas. So, the objective of this work was to establish a method able to quantify the Apple Proliferation (AP) phytoplasma populations in periwinkles. The present work...

By applying a coverage-based read selection and filtration through a healthy plant dataset, and a post-assembly contig selection based on homology and linkage, genome sequence drafts were obtained for four phytoplasma strains belonging to the 16SrIII group (X disease clade), namely Vaccinium Witches' Broom phytoplasma (647 754 nt in 272 contigs), Italian Clover Phyllody phytoplasma strain MA (5...

Suspected phytoplasma symptoms of little leaf, yellowing, chlorosis, phyllody, witches' broom, and stunting were observed on ten different ornamental plant species at New Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Bengaluru, and Pune, India, during March to July 2016. To investigate the possibility of phytoplasma etiology, PCR assays were performed using universal primer pairs (P1/P7 followed by 3Far/3Rev...

Phytoplasma is a infectious agent in plant having cosmopolitan distribution and related to several types of plants diseases which cause severe epidemics of often quarantine purposes. Phytoplasma are prokaryotes belonging to the class Mollicutes because they lack a cell wall, up to now they were not cultivated in pure culture therefore Koch postulates are only sometimes fulfilled by using altern...