Abstract
Apple scar skin viroid (ASSVd) infection is a major limitation to apple fruit quality and causes huge economic losses. In surveys of apple orchards in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, fruits with dappling symptoms were noticed. ASSVd was detected from these fruits and molecularly characterized. Ten clones from three isolates were sequenced, of which seven were new sequence variants of ASSVd. The clones had significant sequence variability (94–100%) with each other. Variability was more common in the pathogenic domain of the viroid genome. Four of the clones were 330 nucleotides (nt) long, and the other six had an additional nucleotide. Phylogenetic analysis showed close affinity of the present isolates with some Chinese and Korean isolates. The study reports seven new variants of ASSVd and also provides the first molecular evidence of viroid infection (ASSVd) in apple in India.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are very grateful to the Director of the Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology, Palampur (CSIR) for providing necessary research facilities and financial support from DST, Govt. of India (Grant no. SR/SO/PS-71/05). Yashika Walia thanks the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for a Junior Research Fellowship during the tenure of her work and Mr. Digvijay Singh for help in DNA sequencing.
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Walia, Y., Kumar, Y., Rana, T. et al. Molecular characterization and variability analysis of Apple scar skin viroid in India. J Gen Plant Pathol 75, 307–311 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10327-009-0168-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10327-009-0168-y