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Turkish Journal of Agriculture and Forestry

Abstract

Erwinia amylovora is the causal agent of fire blight, which is known as one of the most destructive diseases of apple. The use of fire blight-resistant cultivars/rootstocks is one of the most effective methods available to manage this disease. We previously selected 199 local apple cultivars that showed no clearly visible symptoms of fire blight on the plants from the coastline of the eastern Black Sea Region in Türkiye. The region is characterized by the highest rainfall and humidity levels in the country. In this research, young plants of these genotypes grafted onto MM.106 rootstock were screened for fire blight disease resistance in the greenhouse and under shade cloth outdoors at the same location over 3 consecutive years. The susceptible apple cultivar Royal Gala on MM.106 and the rootstock M.9 were used as controls. The plants were inoculated with three highly virulent E. amylovora strains. The genotype-by-strain interactions were evaluated. The current season’s shoot length and the length of the visible necrotic lesions were measured, percent disease severity (DS) was calculated, and the genotypes were grouped into four susceptibility classes. The results showed that 18 genotypes (9.1%) were consistently found to be resistant (R) and/or moderately resistant (MR) to both Ea43b-3 and Ea186A strains in the first 2 years and to the EaBSR14 strain in the 3rd year. DS levels ranged between 0.0% and 25.0% in selected genotypes while Royal Gala and M.9 had 50.7%–70.2% and 84.8%–100%, respectively. Multidimensional scaling analysis distinctly separated all of the R/MR genotypes from the sensitive control genotypes. The data showed high levels of diversity in terms of fire blight resistance among the local apple genotypes in the eastern Black Sea Region. The selected genotypes constitute a valuable genetic source for developing fire blight resistant apple cultivars/rootstocks in breeding studies.

Author ORCID Identifier

KUBİLAY BAŞTAŞ: 0000-0002-2367-1849

HATİCE DUMANOĞLU: 0000-0002-7099-7630

VELİ ERDOĞAN: 0000-0003-0813-898X

AHMET AYGÜN: 0000-0001-7745-3380

RABİA ALBAYRAK DELİALİOĞLU: 0000-0002-1969-4319

SAİD DOST: 0000-0003-4279-7292

ÜMİT SERDAR: 0000-0003-4703-6927

ÖZGÜN KALKIŞIM: 0000-0002-6129-8539

SALİH MADEN: 0000-0002-7291-4712

ZAHİDE KOCABAŞ: 0000-0002-0310-4062

DOI

10.55730/1300-011X.3358

Keywords

Malus, Erwinia amylovora, strain, disease severity

First Page

377

Last Page

390

Publisher

The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK)

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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