Occurrence, Distribution and Molecular Characterization of Phytoplasma Infecting Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) from Tamil Nadu

Abstract

Phytoplasma is an obligate prokaryote infecting a wide array of crops suchas urdbean, sesame, brinjal and many other vegetable crops in India.Several workers have noticed the recent outbreak of phytoplasma diseasein several pulse crops. A study was conducted to identify the phytoplasmainfection in chickpea from Tamil Nadu. The average disease incidence dueto phytoplasma was recorded with a range of 5-20% under field condition.The infected plants produced symptoms including stunting of plants, bushyappearance, reduced leaf size, chlorosis and reddening of infected leaves.The association of phytoplasma with these symptoms was confirmed bynested PCR assay using the universal primers P1/P7 and R16F2n/R16R2.The infected samples were amplified with an amplicon size of 1.2 kb andsequence analysis showed more than 99% similarity with phytoplasmabelongs to Candidatus Phytoplasma aurantifolia. Phylogenetic analysis ofnucleotide sequences confirmed the chickpea phyllody phytoplasma formsa single subgroup with other Indian isolates of various crops.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.000483

Pages

59 - 63

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

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