Efficiency of transmission of Tomato yellow leaf curl virus using single leaflet grafting

Abstract

Grafting using single Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) infected tomato leaflet for transmitting TYLCV infection to healthy rootstock were conducted in this research. The grafting was succeeded with a percentage of 85%, while typical symptoms of infection with TYLCV-IL appeared on 27 seedlings out of 34 tomato seedlings in which the grafting process succeeded, with a percentage of 79.4%. PCR results using TYSF/TYSR primer for grafted seedling samples showed amplification in 28 out of 34 grafted samples with a percentage of 82.35%. whereas 12 of 32 grafted seedling samples were infected with TYLCV-Mld due to PCR results, while typical TYLCV symptoms didn’t appear on three TYLCV-Mld infected samples. The results of this study clearly showed that grafting using a single leaflet can provide a sufficient amount of inocula for transmitting TYLCV to grafted seedlings.