First Report of Root-Knot Nematode Meloidogyne enterolobii on Guava in Vietnam.

ABSTRACT

In southern Vietnam, citrus is interplanted with guava (Psidium guajava L.) for the management of citrus greening disease. Guava seedlings exhibited decline symptoms including leaf browning, growth inhibition, leaf drop, and death. These symptomatic seedlings were accompanied by severely galled roots, possibly attributable to root-knot nematodes. We collected second-stage juveniles from the soil and picked adult females from roots to perform morphological observations. The perineal patterns of most specimens were similar to those in the original description of Meloidogyne enterolobii (3). However, some were similar to that of M. incognita. Such variability among perineal patterns precluded unequivocal identification. Therefore, DNA was extracted from these nematodes and their sequences were compared with those in the DNA sequence database. For the comparison, we employed the primer sets of Powers and Harris (1) to amplify a region between cytochrome oxidase II and the 16S ribosomal DNA gene of mitochondria by PCR. An approximate 700-bp fragment was obtained and analyzed, revealing more than 99.6% homology to M. mayaguensis, a synonym of M. enterolobii (2), when aligned with sequence data of isolates from France (GenBank Accession No. AJ421396), the United States (GenBank Accession No. AY446978), and China (GenBank Accession No. AY831967). These results indicate that the nematode species responsible for guava damage in southern Vietnam is M. enterolobii. To our knowledge, this is the first report of M. enterolobii in Vietnam. References (1) T. O. Powers and T. S. Harris. J. Nematol. 251, 1993. (2) J. Xu et al. Eur. J. Plant Pathol. 110309, 2004. (3) B. Yang and J. D. Eisenback. J. Nematol. 15381, 1983.