Enza Zaden, one of the world's leading vegetable breeding companies, has found a solution to the Tomato Brown Wrinkled Fruit Virus (ToBRFV) disease, which causes devastating damage to the tomato industry. The Enza Zaden tomato breeding team discovered a gene that offers high resistance for this virus, which is spreading rapidly around the world. A great invention!
Sergio de la Fuente van Bentem, researcher in plant pathology at Enza Zaden: “We know that there are many risks to our customers. That's why our company did everything to find a solution. Now that we have the answer, we continue to work hard to develop tomato varieties with high resistance to ToBRFV. We expect our varieties to be ready for growers in the coming years.”
Company researchers believe that this gene currently has no other known counterpart in the field, conferring "high resistance" to this virus in the Tobamovirus genus, known as ToBRFV.
With this innovation, they say, with the implementation of ToBRFV resistance, the entire industry will be secured, from multinational companies in the tomato industry to small vegetable growers.
Tomato Brown Wrinkled Fruit Virus (ToBRFV) was first identified in Israel in 2014. Since then, the virus has been detected in the Middle East, Europe, America, Asia, parts of Africa, Turkey and many other countries.
ToBRFV has an incubation period of two to three weeks before symptoms appear. Once the virus spreads, it takes a tough fight to contain the spread.
Kees Konst , Global Research Director for Tomatoes at Enza Zaden, said that in 2014, when the team at Enza Zaden first heard about ToBRFV from sales representatives in the Middle East, they shared their experience with other tobamo viruses such as tomato mosaic virus (ToMV) and tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). It tells us that it gives a signal of what is coming.
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“We analyzed it and realized it was tobamo. “We realized that because it spreads mechanically, it could reach the whole world,” he says.
De la Fuente van Bentem stated that the gene that provides resistance to ToMV and TMV in the industry has been used for years and there is already a solution, "The genes in question cannot prevent this new tobamo virus and the industry needs to find a new solution to this virus", while Enza Zaden's approach Stating that it is to search for genes that will provide resistance by screening wild tomatoes that can be crossed with cultivated tomatoes, he states that “This is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but there is a gene that shows high resistance against ToBRFV”.
With the intermediate level of resistance (IR- Intermediate Resistance), the spread of the virus is delayed, but eventually the plants show symptoms because the plants contain the virus.
With a high level of resistance (HR-High Resistance), tomato plants tested at Enza Zaden research stations did not show any symptoms of ToBRFV. De la Fuente van Bentem says he thinks that even growers in regions where ToBRFV is not yet a big problem because the virus is spreading faster than expected would be interested in this innovation.
Enza Zaden states that he will also protect with intellectual property rights related to the identification of the gene providing high resistance and the tomato varieties to be developed.
Enza Zaden is one of the largest agricultural companies in the world, active in vegetable breeding and seed production in 25 countries, headquartered in the Netherlands. The company offers the best programs in tomato breeding and more than 30 vegetable groups. Enza Zaden has an organization called Vitalis Organic Seeds that provides certified organic seed production.
For more information, send an e-mail to [email protected] .
Sources
www.enzazaden.com