1. Introduction
Tomato (
Solanum lycopersicum L.) is one of the most important vegetable crops worldwide. In the last few years, the tomato industry has faced a serious threat by the emerging tomato brown rugose fruit virus (ToBRFV), a seed-borne tobamovirus causing disease outbreaks to tomato productions in many countries around the world [
1,
2]. This emerging tobamovirus was first discovered to infect tomatoes in Jordan and Israel in 2014-2015 [
3,
4]. Since then, disease outbreaks caused by ToBRFV have been reported in at least 25 countries in five continents, including Asia [
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10], Africa [
11], Europe [
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22], North America [
23,
24,
25,
26,
27] and South America [
28]. A handful of other countries also reported outbreaks through the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization [
29]. Thus, ToBRFV has been considered as a global pandemic on tomato and pepper [
1,
2]. The rapid spread of ToBRFV outbreaks around the globe is likely caused by several factors: including seed-borne, mechanical transmission and resistance breaking to the popular
Tm-22 gene in tomato, as well as increasing off-shore commercial seed production and global trade activities of seed and produce. The potential dire consequences of ToBRFV on tomato and pepper has prompted many countries to impose quarantine status to ToBRFV [
2]. In the United States, the USDA-APHIS issued a Federal Order in 2019 to inspect imported tomato and pepper seeds and produce from selected countries with ToBRFV.
With few options available for viral disease management, planting a disease-resistance cultivar would be the most economic and eco-friendly measure for ToBRFV disease management. Several resistance genes (
Tm-1,
Tm-2 and
Tm-22) have been used for tomato breeding to control tobamoviruses on tomato [
30,
31,
32]. The
Tm-1 gene was derived from
S. habrochaites PI 126445, the
Tm-2 from
S. peruvianum PI 126926 and the
Tm-22 gene from
S. peruvianum PI 128650 [
1]. Although
Tm-2 and
Tm-22 are allelic, the
Tm-22 gene is the most effective and durable against many strains of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) and tomato mosaic virus (ToMV) [
33,
34]. However, the emerging ToBRFV breaks the popular
Tm-22 gene in tomato [
4,
35,
36] that has been used in tomato breeding for tobamovirus control in the past 60 years [
37]. This resistance breaking ability renders all commercial tomato cultivars vulnerable to ToBRFV infection, necessitating the urgent need to screen tomato germplasm collections for new sources of ToBRFV resistance.
Genetic resistance is one of the most effective approaches to combat the emerging disease caused by ToBRFV. The term ‘tolerance’ is defined as a plant showing no symptoms in spite of being infected by the virus [
38]. The term ‘resistance’ is an infected plant showing no symptoms and also in reduced virus titer from a systemic infection in comparison to a closely related control plant [
39,
40]. The term ‘immunity’ is an inoculated plant showing no symptoms and tested negative for the virus [
41]. Several efforts have been made in the search for new sources of genetic resistance to ToBRFV [
42,
43,
44,
45]. There is certainly remarkable complexity in the genetic resistance to ToBRFV, with more
Solanum species in tolerance and few in resistance. These tolerant lines include
S. chilense [
43,
45],
S. lycopersicum [
42],
S. lycopersicum var. cerasiforme [
43],
S. ochranthum [
43,
44],
S. penellii [
45],
S. peruvianum [
43,
44],
S. pimpinellifolium [
42,
43,
45], and
S. habrochaites [
43,
44]. There is little public information available on genetic inheritance, quantitative trait loci (QTLs) analysis and molecular marker development [
42].
To characterize the genetic complexity of resistance to ToBRFV in tomato, the objective of the present study was to conduct a large-scale screening of two core collections of tomato germplasm maintained at the Tomato Genetics Resource Center (TGRC) in the University of California Davis and the USDA Plant Genetic Resource Unit in Geneva, NY for their resistance against the ToBRFV US isolate. The outcomes of the present study would supply novel genetic materials for genetic study and genomic analysis for molecular markers development to accelerate tomato breeding for resistance to ToBRFV.
3. Discussion
In the present study, by screening a total of 476 tomato core accessions from the USDA and TGRC tomato germplasm collections (
Table 1,
Supplementary Tables S1 and S2), we identified 44 accessions with tolerance to ToBRFV US isolate (
Table 2). A large proportion (31 of 44 or 70%) of these tolerant lines belong to
S. pimpinellifolium. In addition, a number of tolerant lines were also identified from four other species, including
S. corneliomulleri (1),
S. habrochaites (4),
S. peruvianum (3), and
S. subsection
lycopersicon hybrid (5) (
Table 2). The high genetic diversity of tolerance/resistance to ToBRFV is in general agreement with the results obtained from earlier studies by other groups using different isolates of ToBRFV [
42,
43,
44,
45]. Due to various sources of tomato germplasm collections used for evaluation in the present study, these 44 accessions of tomato germplasm with resistance/tolerance properties to ToBRFV are not overlapping with previous studies (
Table 2 and
Table 3). The reason for these new additions is likely that we focused our efforts mainly on the USDA tomato germplasm collections not previously extensively examined. The smaller number of 86 tomato germplasm accessions from TGRC also had little overlapping to those used in previous studies [
42,
43,
44,
45].
There is a diversity of genetic sources of tolerance to ToBRFV in tomato germplasm. Several tobamoviruses are known as harmful pathogens of tomato crop. Among them, the emerging resistant breaking ToBRFV has posed a serious threat to the profitable tomato productions around the world [
1]. However, ToBRFV, a recently emerged plant virus [
3], has been shown to infect all known genotypes of tomato, including those carrying
Tm-1,
Tm-2, and
Tm-22 resistance genes [
4,
36,
46]. With no available commercial tomato cultivars with ToBRFV resistance at the moment, growers adopt preventative measures to protect their tomato crops from virus spread in the production greenhouse facilities. Several effective disinfectants have been selected and recommended to growers for virus control [
47,
48,
49,
50,
51,
52,
53,
54]. However, breeding for disease resistance is still the most powerful and economic way to control viral diseases [
55]. Thus, genetic resistance would be the most effective strategy to combat the emerging ToBRFV. Several authors recently reported tolerance/resistance to ToBRFV in genotypes of
S. lycopersicum,
S. pimpinellifolium,
S. habrochaites and
S. ochrantum [
42,
43,
44,
45]. Although a high number of genetic resources identified with resistance/tolerance to ToBRFV, the majority of them are considered as tolerance (asymptomatic) with some levels of virus infection (
Table 3).
Table 3.
Diversity of germplasm resources with resistance/tolerance to ToBRFV.
Table 3.
Diversity of germplasm resources with resistance/tolerance to ToBRFV.
|
Zinger et al., 2021 [38] |
Kabas et a., 2022 [41] |
Jewehan et al., 2022a [39] |
Jewehan et al., 2022b [40] |
This study |
Total lines |
160 |
44 |
636 |
173 |
476 |
Tolerant lines |
S. pimpinellifolium (9); S. Lycopersicum (8) |
S. pimpinnelifolium (1); S. penellii (1); and S. chilense (2) |
S. pimpinelifolium (26); S. chilense (1); S. lycopersicum var. cerasiforme (4) |
|
S. corneliomulleri (1); S. habrochaites (8); S. peruvianum (3); S. pimpinellifolium (27); and S. subsect. lycopersicon hybrid (5) |
Resistant lines |
S. lycopersicum (1) |
|
S. ochrantum (5) |
S. habrochaites (9); S. peruvianum (1) |
S. pimpinellifolium (4) |
Because we directly used the seeds that were provided by the germplasm repository for our primary screening, individual plants in certain accessions from the germplasm materials might develop various levels of symptom expression. We considered plants with a disease severity class in less than 1 (or a disease severity index < 20%) as tolerance. In this case at least one of their plants in an accession should be asymptomatic. For those accessions to be considered as resistance to ToBRFV, in addition to their low disease severity index, some of their plants should also contain a reduced level of virus titer as assessed by ELISA absorbance values, lower than 0.31 (a threshold for resistance) or by RT-qPCR. Through single plant selection in advance generations, it is very possible to generate a resistant plant with stable inheritance of genetic resistance to ToBRFV. For the S
1 generation, two plants per line were tested individually with an ELISA test using leaf tissue samples collected from upper and lower portions of the plant. As shown in
Figure 2, the two S
1 plants tested demonstrated some levels of genetic segregation for resistance in several resistance lines. Therefore, advance generation through single plant self-pollination is underway to obtain lines with stable inheritance of resistance to ToBRFV.
Based on disease severity class, if every plant (average 7-8 plants per accession) developed a mild mosaic symptom in class 1 (DSI 20%), they are considered as susceptible to ToBRFV. If one or more plants in an accession was rated as asymptomatic in class 0, then the DSI will be less than 20%, such as those accessions in DSI numbers (3.4% and 18.0%,
Supplementary Table S2). Those accessions would be considered as tolerance to ToBRFV because at least one plant was asymptomatic which could be advanced by single plant selection through self-pollination. For those accessions to be considered as resistance, some or all of the test plants in an accession would need to produce a significant low level of the virus titer as defined with a threshold at 0.31 in the absorbance value from an ELISA test. Through advance generation, those resistant plants with a low absorbance value will be selected for developing a resistant line through self-pollination. Although the line 327 (PI 390712) was rated as asymptomatic in the primary screening (
Table 2,
Supplementary Table S2), in the S
1 generation, two plants had higher ELISA readings, which can only be considered as tolerance, but not resistance to ToBRFV (
Figure 3). On the other hand, the line 326 (PI 390711) which was rated as susceptible in the preliminary screening (
Supplementary Table S2) was segregating for resistance to ToBRFV in S
1 plants (Tables 2) where some resistant individuals could be identified through single plant selection in advance generations.
ELISA has been extensively used for virus detection and its OD
405nm absorbance values are used for relative quantification of virus titers in infected plant tissue samples when evaluated along with proper controls (i.e., blank, health tissue and positive virus-infected controls). In fact, the same ELISA method is used by Zinger et al. 2021 [
42] for their evaluation of tomato germplasm materials with resistance to ToBRFV. In the present study, we conducted an extensive screening with a large number of tomato germplasm (476 accessions), each with average 7-8 plants, phenotyping with careful symptom observation with disease severity classes were used to make initial assessment to identify resistance/tolerance plants. ELISA test with absorbance values was used only as a secondary to assess relative virus titers. We did not claim immunity for our selected materials, only disease resistance with reduced virus titers in comparison to those readings from the susceptible controls. The low virus titers observed from those resistant lines were confirmed through the use of RT-qPCR (
Figure 4).
Nevertheless, several lines of
Solanum species have been considered as resistance (with no detectable level of the virus based on appropriate laboratory tests, by either ELISA [
42] or PCR [
43,
44]. To decide a true resistance, it is necessary to conduct lab tests, using either serological tests [
42]) or molecular tests/bioassay [
43,
44] to determine the presence and concentration of the virus in the systemic tissues. These rigorous tests identified only one source of
S. lycopersicum [
42] and several accessions of
S. habrochaites and
S. peruvianum as ToBRFV resistance [
44]. The sexual incompatibility between
S. ochranthum and
S. lycopersicum limits its utility for tomato breeding [
43]. Therefore, the resistant
S. pimpinellifolium lines identified in this study would offer additional choices of genetic resources likely to be useful for tomato breeding against ToBRFV. Even for an experienced breeder, it is still a challenge to use
S. habrochaites or S. peruvianum to cross with tomato (
S. lycopersicum).
S. pimpinellifolium is a close relative to
S. lycopersicum, and the intercross between them is readily compatible in tomato breeding. Therefore, those
S. pimpinellifolium lines with ToBRFV resistance identified in the present study would offer better genetic materials for breeders to choose in making crosses with their elite tomato lines. Although the resistance to ToBRFV in selected
S. pimpinellifolium is not an immunity, to our knowledge, this is the first report in finding a true resistance with significant lower virus titers in several
S. pimpinelllifolium accessions (PI 390713, PI 390714, PI 390716 and PI 390717). This resistance is verified in a separate study (Ling’s lab, unpublished data), where we had used one of the identified
S. pimpinellifolium lines (PI 390717) to generate F2 populations and applied genome re-sequencing technology and quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are associated with the ToBRFV resistance in
S. pimpinellifolium. Molecular marker technology (i.e., Kompetitive Amplified Specific PCR) will be developed to easing tomato breeding process using marker-assisted selection for ToBRFV resistance.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, K.S.L.; methodology, B.C., A.G., N.J., and K.S.L.; validation, N.J. and K.S.L.; formal analysis, K.S.L., B.C., N.J., A.S.; investigation, B.C., A.G., N.J., K.S.L., and A.S.; resources, K.S.L.; A.S. data curation, B.C., N.J., A,G, and K.S.L; writing—original draft preparation, N.J., B.C. and K.S.L.; writing—review and editing, B.C., A.G., N.J., A.S. and K.S.L.; visualization, N.J. and K.S.L.; supervision, K.S.L.; project administration, K.S.L.; funding acquisition, K.S.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.