Fourth International Bemisia Workshop International Whitefly Genomics Workshop
Tomato Plants and Whitefly Interactions: Can It Be a Love Story?
1 Institute of Plant Sciences, Volcani Center, ARO, Bet Dagan, Israel. Correspondence: lapidotm@volcani.agri.gov.il
2 Hazera Genetics, Mivhor, Israel
Apart from virus transmission, whiteflies cause extensive direct damage to crops through excessive sap removal, excretion of honeydew that promotes the growth of sooty mold fungi, and by inducing systemic developmental disorders. In tomato, whiteflies have been shown to induce irregular ripening (Schuster et al. 1990. HortScience 25, 1618–1620). Is this always the case? In a study of the levels of resistance to Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) among different tomato genotypes, plant performance following inoculation was compared between plants exposed to non-viruliferous whiteflies and plants not exposed to whiteflies. Total yield and yield components were measured. As expected, all the TYLCV-infected plants expressed disease symptoms, and suffered from growth inhibition and a yield reduction due to the devastating effect of the virus. The viral induced damage was negatively correlated with the level of resistance displayed by the test plant. Therefore, the higher the TYLCV resistance, the less the yield reduction. To our surprise some of the genotypes exposed to non-viruliferous whiteflies did not show any whitefly-induced damage. Moreover, the yield components of some of the whitefly-treated tomato cultivars were greater than that of the control untreated plants.
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