Abstract
Sanhua plum (Prunus salicina), native to Guangdong Province, China, is a highly valued fruit tree because of the fruit's characteristic taste and excellent nutritional properties. A severe blighting of shoots of Sanhua plum was observed at local Sanhua orchards in Guangdong Province from 2019 to 2021, which weakens the tree vigour and reduces the fruit yield. This study aimed to characterize the symptoms of Sanhua plum leaf blight and shoot dieback, evaluate the incidence and impact, and identify the causal agent and evaluate its pathogenicity. The disease was present in all three Sanhua orchards surveyed (a total of 29 hectares), but incidence varied with locations and years, ranging from 0.4% to 3.7%. An oomycete species was isolated from symptomatic shoots collected from the surveyed fields. Based on morphological and cultural characteristics and combined phylogenetic analysis of two molecular markers, including the internal transcribed spacer regions (ITS) of rDNA and Ras-related Ypt1 gene, 15 isolates were identified as belonging to the species Phytophthora nicotianae. The isolates were pathogenic to Sanhua plum plants in nursery experiments, and symptoms identical to that observed in the fields were reproduced. The pathogen was isolated consistently from the inoculated plants, confirming Koch's postulates. Shoot blight caused by P. nicotianae represents a new threat to Sanhua plum productivity and longevity in southern China.
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Data Availability
The sequences produced in this study have been deposited into NCBI GenBank and can be accessed using the accession numbers listed in Table 2.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grants from Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of High Technology for Plant Protection (No. Zhizhong2021-04), Jiangsu Agriculture Science and Technology Innovation Fund (JASTIF) (No. CX(20)3125), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 32272477, 32102154, 31871907), the Open Project of Joint International Research Laboratory of Agriculture and Agri-Product Safety of Ministry of Education of China (No. JRK20180012), the Yangzhou University 2016 Project for Excellent Young Key Teachers, and High-Level Talent Support Program of Yangzhou University. The authors thank Dr Vaibhav Srivastava (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden) for critically editing the manuscript.
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Wen, K., Chen, XX., Zhou, X. et al. Phytophthora nicotianae: a new threat to Sanhua plum (Prunus salicina) causing shoot blight in China. Eur J Plant Pathol 166, 329–339 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10658-023-02665-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10658-023-02665-4