2016 Volume 60 Issue 2 Pages 59-64
Hot peppers (Capsicum spp.) are essential spice in Indonesian meal. Recently, diseases caused by viruses are emerging as serious problems in pepper production at northern Sumatra. Viruses are destabilizing farmers’ incomes and the prices of spice used daily by the consumers. In the present study, to obtain the fundamental knowledge of severe damage in pepper production, field research and molecular study were conducted to assess the genetic identity and diversity of pepper-infecting viruses. Five local farmers’ fields located at the suburbs of Banda Aceh were chosen for the study. At each field approximately 500 to 3,000 plants of C. annuum were cultivated. The yellow leaf curl symptoms were observed in more than 81 % of plants in all the fields, and symptoms reached 100 % at four fields out of five. As yellow leaf curl symptoms are often caused by begomoviruses, DNA-A full-length sequences were determined and clarified that Pepper yellow leaf curl Indonesia virus (PepYLCIV), Tomato yellow leaf curl Kanchanaburi virus (TYLCKaV), and Ageratum yellow vein virus (AYVV) were infecting pepper plants. By detecting three different begomoviruses independently using specific primers, it was suggested that most of pepper plants were infected with two to three viruses. The present study inferred that mixed infection of begomoviruses is associated with the serious virus problems in pepper production at northern Sumatra, Indonesia.