Technology

Tomato appears to be an ideal heaven for viruses. So far more than ten important viruses have been found to be naturally infecting tomato and some of these viruses have large number of distinct strains .A majority of these viruses have come to light during the last two decades. The most devastating viruses affecting tomato are "Tomato leaf curl virus" (ToLCV), causing tomato leaf curl disease (ToLCD) and "Ground nut bud necrosis virus" causing bud necrosis disease. The biological and molecular data suggest that ToLCV and other begomovirus complexes are expanding both in terms of their host range, virulence/resistance breaking nature, geographic distribution and making difficult to manage whitefly transmitted begomoviruses. In the view of emerging situation; monitoring, survelience, molecular epidemiological studies and engineering virus resistance are some of the key issues in the management of begomoviruses. More