Kiwifruit leaf spot disease bacterial facto investigation in north of Iran

In order to investigate the bacterial agents causing kiwifruit leaf spot disease in Iran, sampling performed in two consecutive years from the kiwifruit growing areas in the northern provinces. More than 400 bacterial strains isolated from the leaves of infected trees with various signs of leaf spot like brown angular spot, white spot with brown border, orange color spot and water soaking spot with yellow penumbra. 130 strains identified as pathogenic factors in different pathogenicity test. Among them, 25 strains were suspicious to have the Pseudomonas genus according to morphological properties such as color and shape of the colonis and studed from the phenotypic and molecular view point. All the strains had positive result through the hypersensitive reaction test in tobacco and geranium leaves, but during other phenotypic and molecular tests, they had different results. These tests proved that half of the strains in this study have the most similarity to P. syringae. Using two pairs of specific primers that designed based on the 16S-23S rRNA (ITS) sequence, by the name of PsaF1⁄R2 and PsaF3⁄R4, made it clear that strains: 20, 86, 101, 138, 132, 117, 194 and 230, are belonging to P. syringae pv. actinidiae. This experience that rpoD gene sequence of other 17 strains and its dissimilarity to any of the rpoD gene sequences, belonged to the species of genus Pseudomonas in the genebank, proves that these strains are unknown species of Pseudomonas, makes it necessary that determind the taxonomic status of these strains further investigations are required.