Fungal microbiome associated with grapevine trunk diseases in Oregon vineyards

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Achala KC

Monica Hernandez, and Posy Busby

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Grapevine trunk disease (GTD) is a disease complex that consists of the largest group of fungal pathogens causing disease and progressive vine decline. Due to the complex nature of GTD pathogens, understanding the disease as a phenomenon of single species or multiple species infection is always challenging. In addition, the environmental variables play a greater role in the dominance of one species over another.
It is important to understand the species that are predominant in a region and their causal role in GTD development so that targeted disease management programs can be developed. In this research project, we study the diversity of GTD pathogens in grapevines of Northern and Southern Oregon; as well as to compare the different disease management practices including vineyard floor management and pruning wound protection. For the first objective, we explored how fungal communities vary along gradients of GTD disease incidence, vineyard age, and geography in Oregon and conducted a molecular field study, amplifying the ITS1 region of fungal DNA extracted from vine stem tissue sampled from 29 vineyards in the Rogue and Willamette Valleys (n= 396). In total, we found over 2000 Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) in stem tissues. For second objective, we identified a vineyard in southern Oregon to implement both pruning wound protection and soil treatments. For the pruning wound treatments, we applied three treatments with four replicate vines per treatment. In this study we propose to provide data on which types of GTDs are most prevalent in Oregon by performing next-generation sequencing (NGS) on wood tissue samples collected from vineyards in the Rogue Valley, located in Southern Oregon, and in Willamette Valley, located in Northern Oregon.

View Project Final Report