Bioassay for the In Vitro Pathogenicity Evaluation of Burkholderia gladioli on Solanum tuberosum Plants.

The potato, Solanum tuberosum, is the fourth most important crop for human food and is of social and economic significance especially for developing countries. Burkholderia gladioli, an aerobic, gram-negative, rod-shaped bacterium, is a plant and human opportunistic pathogen, which we previously observed in potatoes and paprika plants in Venezuela. Here, we use an isolate of this bacterium as a model to establish a pathogenicity test for the 'Arbolona negra' (native Venezuelan) and 'Granola' potato cultivars by establishing an experimental pathosystem using in vitro produced leaves and microtubers. For this, we inoculated microtubers and leaves from in vitro plants with different concentrations of B. gladioli cultures. The results show statistically significant differences in the incidence, severity and post-inoculation colonization of the pathogen. This is the first report of a pathogenicity study of B. gladioli infecting potatoes using an in vitro system under controlled environmental conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]