Skip to main content
Entomology 2023 Main banner
Bayer
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Presentation Icons
In-Person
In-Person
On-Demand
On-Demand
Student Competition
Student Competition
Poster
Poster
Ticketed Event
Ticketed Event
Back

10-Minute Paper

Plant-Insect Ecosystems

P-IE: Vectors of Plant Diseases

Thrips transmission of novel tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) resistance-breaking (RB) strains

Wednesday, November 8, 2023
4:54 PM – 5:06 PM ET
Location: Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, National Harbor 3
In-Person
With an expansive host range of over 1000 plant species across 90 families, tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) — since its first report in 1915 in Australia — has become a pandemic virus with an estimated economic impact over $1 billion annually. Current management strategies for TSWV heavily rely on growing single gene resistant cultivars of tomato (‘Sw-5b’ gene) and pepper (‘Tsw’ gene) deployed worldwide, combined with multiple pesticide applications to control thrips, a supervector of TSWV and a cosmopolitan pest. However, the increased virulence of TSWV through emergence of resistance breaking (RB) strains in recent years has significantly escalated what is already an unparalleled dual threat to agricultural production worldwide. Our lab reported new, more virulent TSWV RB strains, with novel RB mutations capable of swiftly disrupting single-gene resistance in all tested commercial tomato and pepper cultivars. Our findings show that thrips efficiently transmit all three tomato-infecting RB strains from Texas, California, and Mexico and one pepper-infecting RB strain from Texas. Furthermore, these strains along with their non-RB counterparts have strain-specific effects on thrips fitness, with significant potential implications for TSWV epidemics and thrips/TSWV management.