A New ‘Candidatus Liberibacter’ Species Associated with Diseases of Solanaceous Crops

Abstract

A new disease of glasshouse-grown tomato and pepper in New Zealand has resulted in plant decline and yield loss. Affected plants are characterized by spiky, chlorotic apical growth, curling or cupping of the leaves, and overall stunting. Transmission electron microscopy revealed the presence of phloem-limited bacterium-like organisms in symptomatic plants. The strategy used to identify the bacterium involved using specific prokaryote polymerase chain reaction (PCR) primers in combination with universal 16S rRNA primers. Sequence analysis of the 16S rRNA gene, the 16S/23S rRNA spacer region, and the rplKAJL-rpoBC operon revealed that the bacterium shared high identity with ‘Candidatus Liberibacter’ species. Phylogenetic analysis showed that the bacterium is distinct from the three citrus liberibacter species previously described and has been named ‘Candidatus Liberibacter solanacearum’. This is the first report of a liberibacter naturally infecting a host outside the Rutaceae family. A specific PCR primer pair was developed for its detection.

Widespread occurrence of “Candidatus liberibacter africanus subspecies capensis” in Calodendrum capense in South Africa

“…Nucleotide similarity searches of Genbank were conducted using the BLAST algorithm of the National Centre for Biotechnology Information. Amplicon sequences were compared to cognate regions of the following Genbank accessions for Laf (LAU09675); LafC (AF248498), Lam (EF122254), Las (M94319), and a recently discovered Liberibacter from tomato, Lso (EU834131) (Liefting et al 2009). Multiple alignments were prepared in DNAMAN and alignments were used to prepare phylogenetic trees using a maximum likelihood method (Hasegawa et al 1985;Tamura and Nei 1993).…”

Efecto de antioxidantes y señalizadores en plantas de papa (Solanum tuberosum L.) infectadas con Candidatus Liberibacter solanacearum bajo condiciones de invernadero

“…En Estados Unidos la enfermedad causada en la papa por Ca. L. solanacearum se le conoce como Zebra Chip (ZC) debido al pardeamiento que ocasiona en la pulpa del tubérculo (Abad et al, 2009;Liefting et al, 2009), e inicialmente a la bacteria se le nombro Candidatus Liberibacter psyllaurous (Hansen et al, 2008). Otro problema sanitario es el Amarillamiento del Psílido (AP), ocasionado según algunos autores por la inyección de toxinas que realiza el psílido Bactericera cockerelli Sulc.…”

Detection of “Candidatus Liberibacter solanacearum” in tomato on Norfolk Island, Australia

“…DNA extractions of plant tissue were done from freeze-dried tissue using the Bioline ISOLATE II Plant DNA kit. Both samples gave positive PCR amplifications with CLso-specific primers OI2C/OA2 (Liefting et al 2009), with or without the generic nested primers Lib16S01F/ Lib16S01R (Beard et al 2013), and also with the specific primers LP1611F/LP480R (Hansen et al 2008). Sequencing of the former two PCR products from isolates Q4978 (GenBank MG589915) and Q6005 (GenBank MG589916) gave a consensus sequences of 1073 nt from the 16S rRNA gene.…”