Development of new technologies to eliminate huanglongbing from budwood source trees

Development of new technologies to eliminate huanglongbing from budwood source trees

Report Date: 04/15/2014
Project: 562   Year: 2014
Category: Other
Author: Richard Lee
Sponsor: Citrus Research and Development Foundation

The purpose of this project is to determine methods to effectively eliminate Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus (Las), the bacterium associated with huanglongbing (HLB) in Florida, from citrus. Emphasis is being placed on cryotherapy with conventional shoot tip grafting being used for comparison purposes. Application of crytherapy to recover plants free of HLB from budwood approaches 95 percent efficiency. The project also includes determining the effectiveness of using young indicator plants for biological indexing to verify elimination of graft transmissible pathogens. During this past quarter, additional selections of mandarin and sweet orange materials have been forwarded to Ft. Collins for therapy using cryotherapy and shoot tip grafting. Recovered plants are allowed to grow for 12-14 weeks following therapy before testing for the presence of HLB. With pre-treatment and cryotherapy, results indicated the procedure is very effective at eliminating Citrus tatterleaf virus and citrus viroids; pathogens most difficult to eliminate by thermaltherapy and by shoot tip grafting. Additional selections of several varieties of citrus infected with huanglongbing have been forwarded to Ft. Collins for therapy, and will be tested in another 6-8 weeks. In Riverside, a system has been developed using Jiffy pots for the seedling used as indicator plants, allowing for a growout of about 75 days from the seed planting until the young plants can be inoculated and used as indicators. The inoculum bud survival is very high, greater than 98 percent. The entire indexing procedure can be done with the plants in the Jiffy pots. A trial was performed to compare the results obtained by using the mini-plant biological indexing compared with the traditional standard indexing protocol, using indicator plants 10-14 months old, for 15 accessions. The results from the mini-plant index revealed the presence of Citrus vein enation virus in one accession which had been missed using the traditional standard indexing protocol. The advantage of using the mini-plants for biological indexing is that 35 indicator plants may be contained in the space normally occupied by 3 indicator plants; quicker turnover of the small plants for indexing means more accessions may be tested per year; biological indexing for pathogens expressing only under cool temperatures may be indexed for year-round as the smaller plants may be placed close to the cool pads in the greenhouse, and because they occupy less space, the whole trial can be done utilizing the cooler temperatures.


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