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First Report of Verticillium Wilt of Gold Kiwifruit, Actinidia chinensis Cv. Hort 16A, Caused by Verticillium albo-atrum in Chile

Gold kiwifruit, Actinidia chinensis Planch cv. Hort 16A, was first planted in Chile in 2003 and vines started dying within 2 years. By the end of the 2007--2008 growing season, as much as 80% of the plants in several orchards had died. The disease was characterized by a conspicuous reddish brown discoloration of the xylem and the sudden wilting and dieback of plants any time during the growing season. In the spring, entire plants or parts of plants failed to break buds. In others, the buds broke, but juvenile leaf clusters then wilted and died. On severely affected plants, scion watershoots wilted and died. The disease was often accompanied by shallow cracking of the bark and slight sponginess of the underlying cortex. The disease was apparently most severe in sites that had been planted to Gold kiwifruit immediately after removal of apple, pear, citrus, or grape. Orchards planted following long-term maize, wheat, or grass culture were almost disease free. A fungus was consistently isolated from symptomatic vascular tissue disinfected in 1% sodium hypochlorite and plated on potato dextrose agar. Conidiogenous cells were arranged in verticels; conidia were hyaline, elliptical, single celled, and measured 3.5 to 8.5 × 1.8 to 4.3 μm (average 5.5 × 2.5 μm). Dark, resting mycelium developed after 1 to 2 weeks of incubation. On the basis of these morphological characteristics, the fungus was identified as Verticillium albo-atrum Reinke & Berthier. Identification was confirmed by sequencing part of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region with primers ITS1 and ITS4. The sequence of a representative isolate showed high homology (98% identity over a length of 494 bp) with a DNA fragment (NCBI Accession No. 108476) of V. albo-atrum from alfalfa. To complete pathogenicity tests, 20 healthy, 1-year-old Hort 16A kiwi vines grafted on Hayward kiwifruit (A. deliciosa Chevalier) seedlings were inoculated by injection of 20 μl of 10⁶ conidia/ml into stems of the scion. Twenty control plants were injected with an equal volume of sterile distilled water. Plants were held in a controlled environment facility at 24°C with 16 h of light per day. Eight weeks after inoculation, typical wilting and dieback symptoms developed on 90% of the plants. Control plants injected with water remained healthy. Verticillium wilt has never been reported on kiwifruit (A. deliciosa) in Chile. V. albo-atrum has a rather narrow host range and is mainly reported as a pathogen on alfalfa, hop, soybean, tomato, and potato (1). To our knowledge, this is the first report of V. albo-atrum causing wilt and dieback on Gold kiwifruit (A. chinensis) cv. Hort 16A. The fungal isolates have been deposited in the Plant Pathology Laboratory of the Sanidad Vegetal Department of Agricultural Sciences Faculty of University of Chile under the name Actinidia chinensis/V. albo-atrum No. 1 to 8.

Reference: (1) E. K. Ligoxigakis et al. Phytoparasitica 30:511, 2002.