Leaf abscission is a common response of plants to drought stress. Some species, such as citrus, have evolved a specific behaviour in this respect, keeping their leaves attached to the plant body during water stress until this is released by irrigation or rain. This study successfully reproduced this phenomenon under controlled conditions (24h of water stress followed by 24h of rehydration) and ...

Double stranded cDNA of cucumber pale fruit viroid (CPFV) has been cloned by the method of Okayama and Berg (Mol.Cell.Biol.2,161-170 (1982)) and the complete nucleotide sequence was established. The covalently closed circular molecules of single-stranded CPFV RNA consists of 303 nucleotides. The nucleotide sequence of CPFV was compared with the previously established sequence of hop stunt viroi...

background and aims: viroids are smallest known plant pathogens and cause several economically significant diseases. until recently, viroid detection relied mainly on biological tests and indexing. today various diagnostic techniques such as nucleic acid hybridization, southern blot and reverse transcription coupled with polymerase chain reaction (rt-pcr) are being used for detection and diagno...

Carrizo citrange (Citrus sinensisxPoncirus trifoliata) is a citrus hybrid widely used as a rootstock, whose genetic manipulation to improve different growth characteristics is of high agronomic interest. In this work, transgenic Carrizo citrange plants have been produced overexpressing sense and antisense CcGA20ox1 (a key enzyme of GA biosynthesis) under control of the 35S promoter to modify pl...

General procedures for the extraction of Citrus leaf proteins for analysis by two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE) were developed through the evaluation and modification of existing methods. Among the methods evaluated, the best results were obtained when Tris-HCl, KCl, and phenol extractions were followed by precipitation with organic solvents to purify and concentrate the samples. The utili...

Huanglongbing (HLB) or citrus greening disease is an extremely dangerous infection which has severely influenced the citrus industry in Florida. It was also recently found in California and Texas. There is no effective cure for this disease reported yet. The infected trees should be identified and removed immediately to prevent the disease from being spread to other trees. The visual leaf sympt...

The intracellular localization of viroids has been investigated by viroid-specific in situ hybridization and analysis by digital microscopy of the distribution of the fluorescent hybridization signals. Isolated nuclei from green leaf tissue of tomato plants infected with potato spindle tuber viroid (PSTVd) were bound to microscope slides, fixed with formaldehyde and hybridized with biotinylated...