First Report of ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma trifolii’ Related Strain Associated with Yellowing and Witches’-Broom of Industrial Hemp (Cannabis sativa) in Arizona

In Arizona, industrial hemp (Cannabis sativa) is a newly cultivated crop for fiber, oil, cosmetic products, and health food. During July to September 2020, two fields of industrial hemp crops were identified in southern Arizona with 10 to 30% incidence of plants showing witches’ broom. Disease incidence was assessed by counting symptomatic plants in 4 randomly selected rows of 25 plants in each field. Symptoms ranged from leaf mottling and yellowing on mildly affected plants to leaf curling and shortened internode length of stem on severely affected plants (Fig. 1). Shoots were randomly collected from eight symptomatic plants and three asymptomatic plants in the same area. Genomic DNA was extracted from 200 mg of each sample using DNeasy Plant Pro Kit (Qiagen Inc., Valencia, CA) according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Phytoplasma was tested by a real-time PCR assay and TaqMan probe targeting the 23S ribosomal RNA gene that detects a wide range of known Phytoplasmas (Hodgetts et al., 2009). Beet curly top virus (BCTV) was targeted using BCTV-specific primers BCTV1 and BCTV2 following a method by Rondon (Rondon et al., 2016). BCTV was not detected in the plants, but Phytoplasmas were detected in all eight symptomatic plants, but not in the three control plants. The positive DNA samples were used to identify the phytoplasma by nested PCR using universal phytoplasma-specific primer pairs P1/P6 (Deng, S. et al. 1991) and R16F2n/R16R2 (Gundersen et al., 1996) targeting the 16S rRNA gene and the resulting 1.25 kb fragment in 4 positive samples was subjected to Sanger sequencing (Eton Bioscience, San Diego). All 4 sequences were identical and deposited in GenBank under accession MW981356. BLASTn results indicated 100% identity with that of several ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma trifolii’ strains on potato (KR072666, KF178706) in Washington and chile peppers (HQ436488) in New Mexico. It also shared 99.84% identity with the sequence of the reference strain of Candidatus Phytoplasma trifolii’ (AY390261) that caused clover proliferation. The phytoplasma AZH1 was classified as a member of subgroup A within group16SrVI using iPhyClassifier, an interactive online tool for phytoplasma classification and taxonomic assignment (Zhao et al., 2013). Phylogenetic analysis revealed that the phytoplasma AZH1 clustered with other isolates of ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma trifolii’ (Fig. 2), including the strain NV1 associated with witches’ broom on C. sativa in Nevada (Feng et al. 2019). This is the first report of ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma trifolii’ related strain associated with yellowing and witches’ broom on hemp in Arizona. This finding is significant as the observation of symptoms at 30% incidence in one field suggested that the identified pathogen may pose a significant threat to the production of industrial hemp production in Arizona.