First report of a ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma australasia’ related strain (16SrII‐D) associated with Amaranthus hypochondriacus inflorescence malformation in India

Abstract

Samples of two symptomless and two diseased plants were collected. Total DNA was extracted and subjected to a nested PCR assay using primers P1/P7 and R16F2n/R16R2 (Deng & Hiruki 1991; Gundersen & Lee, 1996) and a semi-nested PCR assay using primers secAfor1/sArev3 and SecAfor2/SecArev3 (Hodgetts et al., 2008). The expected PCR-amplified products of phytoplasma 16S rRNA (c. 1.25 Kb) and secA gene (c. 600 bp) were obtained from the two diseased plant samples but not from the symptomless plants. The PCR products were cloned (Instaclone PCR cloning kit, Fermentas, USA) and sequenced directly at Eurofins Genomics Pvt. Ltd., Karnataka, India, and the sequences deposited in GenBank. BLAST analysis revealed that the partial 16S rRNA (GenBank Accession Nos. ON611696 -ON611697) and secA gene (ON584230 -ON584231) sequences of This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.