Vol. 11, Issue 4 (2022)

Author(s):
Abirami R, Manoranjitham SK, Rajasree V, Mohankumar S and Karthikeyan G

Abstract:
An intensive fixed plot survey was conducted in TNAU Research farm during in all cropping season of the year 2019-2020 to document and investigate the incidence of little leaf disease in brinjal. There was no incidence of little leaf till 75 days post transplanting, later the incidence was started and progressed gradually to more than 50% at the end of the cropping season. Infected samples were subjected for Nested PCR using 16-23S ribosomal universal primer (P1 & P7) to amplifying 16S rRNA region followed by amplifying the internal region of 16SrRNA region using nested primer (R16F2n & R16Frn) to detect and characterize the phyoplasma infecting brinjal. Upon sequence analysis the brinjal crop in TNAU research farm was found to be infected with two important species of phytoplasma viz., Candidatus phytoplasma trifolii (Ca. P. trifolli) and Candidatus Phytoplasma aurentifolia (Ca. P. aurentifolia) with 99 and 99.5% in identity with other isolates in BLASTn analysis. Phylogenetic analysis by neighbor joining tree method revealed that the two isolates (LL TNB1 and LL TNB2) clustered among their subgroups using. The nucleotide sequences of phytoplasma were analyzed in iphy classifier online search tool to find the subgroups of the phytoplasma. LL TNB1 was found to be clover proliferation group belongs to 16Sr VID sub-group and LL TNB2 was belongs to witches broom group of 16Sr IIB.