Phytoplasma is an obligate prokaryote infecting a wide array of crops such as urdbean, sesame, brinjal and many other vegetable crops in India. Several workers have noticed the recent outbreak of phytoplasma disease in several pulse crops. A study was conducted to identify the phytoplasma infection in chickpea from Tamil Nadu. The average disease incidence due to phytoplasma was recorded with a range of 5-20% under field condition. The infected plants produced symptoms including stunting of plants, bushy appearance, reduced leaf size, chlorosis and reddening of infected leaves. The association of phytoplasma with these symptoms was confirmed by nested PCR assay using the universal primers P1/P7 and R16F2n/R16R2. The infected samples were amplified with an amplicon size of 1.2 kb and sequence analysis showed more than 99% similarity with phytoplasma belongs to Candidatus Phytoplasma aurantifolia. Phylogenetic analysis of nucleotide sequences confirmed the chickpea phyllody phytoplasma forms a single subgroup with other Indian isolates of various crops.
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