Abstract:

In the winter of 2007, a new virus disease on tomato broke out in Jiangsu and caused great losses to local tomato production. The infected tomato showed severely stunted, upward curling and prominent yellowing along margins and interveinal regions. Based on its symptoms and the occurrence of Bemisia tabaci in the fields, Whitefly-transmitted geminivirus (WTG) was suspected to be the pathogen, and WTG was identified in all the 20 samples. The nucleotide sequence identities between these isolates were extremely high (over 98.9%), which means no complex infection was found. The result of BLAST revealed they shared high sequence identities (over 99%) with a member of Begomovirus: Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV).

Key words: tomato, tomato yellow leaf curl disease, whitefly-transmitted geminivirus, molecular diagnosis