Abstract
Litchi tomato (LT) (
) is a solanaceous weed that is considered a biological control tool to manage potato cyst nematode (PCN) in Europe and is being explored for use in Idaho. Two Several LT lines were clonally maintained as stocks in the university greenhouse since 2013 and were also established in tissue culture at the same time. In 2018, tomato (
cv. Alisa Craig) scions were grafted onto two LT rootstocks originating either from healthy-looking greenhouse stocks or from tissue culture-maintained plants. Unexpectedly, tomatoes grafted onto the greenhouse-maintained rootstocks of LT displayed severe symptoms of stunting, foliar deformation, and chlorosis, while grafts onto the same LT lines from tissue culture produced healthy-looking tomato plants. Tests for the presence of several viruses known to infect solanaceous plants were conducted on symptomatic tomato scion tissues using ImmunoStrips (Agdia, Elkhard, IN) and RT-PCR (Elwan et al. 2017) but yielded negative results. High throughput sequencing (HTS) was then used to identify possible pathogens that could have been responsible for the symptoms observed in tomato scions. Samples from two symptomatic tomato scions, two asymptomatic scions grafted onto the tissue culture-derived plants, and two greenhouse-maintained rootstocks were subjected to HTS. Total RNA from the four tomato and two LT samples was depleted of ribosomal RNA and subjected to HTS on an Illumina MiSeq platform producing 300-bp paired-end reads and raw reads were adapter and quality cleaned. For the tomato samples, the clean reads were mapped against the
L. reference genome, and unmapped paired reads were assembled producing between 4,368 and 8,645 contigs. For the LT samples, all clean reads were directly assembled, producing 13,982 and 18,595 contigs. In the symptomatic tomato scions and the two LT rootstock samples, a 487-nt contig was found, comprising an ~1.35 tomato chlorotic dwarf viroid (TCDVd) genome and exhibiting 99.7% identity with it (GenBank accession AF162131; Singh et al. 1999). No other virus-related or viroid contigs were identified. RT-PCR analysis using a pospiviroid primer set Pospi1-FW/RE (Verhoeven et al. 2004), and a TCDVd-specific primer set TCDVd-Fw/TCDVd-Rev (Olmedo-Velarde et al. 2019) produced 198-nt and 218-nt bands, respectively, thus confirming the presence of TCDVd in tomato and LT samples. These PCR products were Sanger sequenced and confirmed to be TCDVd-specific; the complete sequence of the Idaho isolate of TCDVd was deposited in GenBank under the accession number OQ679776. Presence of TCDVd in LT plant tissue was confirmed by the APHIS PPQ Laboratory in Laurel, MD. Asymptomatic tomatoes and LT plants from tissue culture were found negative for TCDVd. Previously, TCDVd was reported to affect greenhouse tomatoes in Arizona and Hawaii (Ling et al. et al. 2009; Olmedo-Velarde et al. 2019), however, this is the first report of TCDVd infecting litchi tomato (
). Five additional greenhouse-maintained LT lines were found TCDVd-positive using RT-PCR and Sanger sequencing. Given the very mild or asymptomatic infection of TCDVd in this host, molecular diagnostic methods should be used to screen LT lines for the presence of this viroid to avoid inadvertent spread of TCDVd. Another viroid, potato spindle tuber viroid, was reported to be transmitted through LT seed (Fowkes et al. 2021), and transmission of TCDVd through LT seed may also be responsible for this TCDVd outbreak in the university greenhouse, although no direct evidence was collected. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of TCDVd infection in
and also the first report of the TCDVd occurrence in Idaho.