During the past years, tomato production in Albania showed a significant growth with the total acreage in 2019 reaching 6663 ha (FAO: 2020). In October 2021, greenhouse tomato crops (unknown hybrid) in Fier and Berat regions in Albania, showed discoloration, mosaic, and narrowing of upper leaf blades (Luria et al.2017). The fruits of affected plants showed brown necrotic spots and wrinkled skin with an incidence of 15-20%. These symptoms resemble those caused by the tomato brown rugose fruit virus (ToBRFV).
Therefore, samples from ten symptomatic and five asymptomatic plants from each region were collected and tested for the presence of ToBRFV by reverse transcription (RT)-PCR using the primer set ToBRFV-F7/ToBRFV-R7 (Salem et al. 2020), which amplifies a 689 bp fragment of the movement and the coat protein genes. ToBRFV was identified in all symptomatic but not in the asymptomatic plants. Two randomly selected isolates (namely ToBRFV-Al-F and ToBRFV-Al-B, one from each geographic region) were chosen for Sanger sequencing and subsequent BlastN analysis revealed over 99% nucleotide identity of both sequences (accession numbers OL763429 and OL763428) with isolates from Greece (MN815773), the Netherlands (MN882064), Turkey (MT118666), Israel (KX619418) and Mexico (MK319944). Furthermore, six Nicotiana glutinosa plants (3 plants per isolate) were inoculated with leaf extracts of isolates ‘ToBRFV-Al-F’ and ‘ToBRFV-Al-B’.
Three days post-inoculation, local necrotic lesions developed on inoculated leaves indicative of a tobamovirus infection. Leaf tissue from all symptomatic N. glutinosa plants tested positive for ToBRFV in RT-PCR using the same primers. To our knowledge, this is the first report of ToBRFV in tomatoes in Albania.
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Orfanidou, Chrysoula & Cara, Magdalena & Merkuri, Jordan & Papadimitriou, Konstantinos & Katis, Nikolaos & Maliogka, Varvara. (2022). First report of tomato brown rugose fruit virus in tomato in Albania. Journal of Plant Pathology. 10.1007/s42161-022-01060-y.