First report of tomato brown rugose fruit virus in tomato in Albania

During the past years, tomato production in Albania showed a significant growth with the total acreage in 2019 reaching 6663 ha (FAO: 2020). In October 2021, greenhouse tomato crops (unknown hybrid) in Fier and Berat regions in Albania, showed discoloration, mosaic, and narrowing of upper leaf blades (Luria et al.2017). The fruits of affected plants showed brown necrotic spots and wrinkled skin with an incidence of 15-20%. These symptoms resemble those caused by the tomato brown rugose fruit virus (ToBRFV). Therefore, samples from ten symptomatic and five asymptomatic plants from each region were collected and tested for the presence of ToBRFV by reverse transcription (RT)-PCR using the primer set ToBRFV-F7/ToBRFV-R7 (Salem et al. 2020), which amplifies a 689 bp fragment of the movement and the coat protein genes. ToBRFV was identified in all symptomatic but not in the asymptomatic plants. Two randomly selected isolates (namely ToBRFV-Al-F and ToBRFV-Al-B, one from each geographic ...