e. grapevine cultivar) have been reported GSK126 ic50 to influence the incidence of these trunk diseases (Bertsch et al. 2009;

Surico et al. 2006; Graniti et al. 2000), thereby suggesting that these CB-839 purchase fungal pathogens are a prerequisite for the expression of the disease symptoms, but are themselves not always responsible for their appearance. In spite of an impressive number of phytopathological studies over the past years, the epidemiology and etiology of grapevine wood diseases remain poorly understood (Bertsch et al. 2009). The assumption that these fungi are latent pathogens implies that they may live asymptomatically for at least part of their life in a plant, but should then, at some point, modify their behavior and become invasive, thereby leading to the expression of the disease symptoms (Verhoeff 1974). A first objective of the present study was to determine which fungal buy PF-562271 species modified their latent behavior and became invasive when esca symptoms appear. Secondly, as the contamination of nursery plants is presently one of the major concerns of the wine industry, we also wanted to determine whether the esca-associated fungi were transmitted to nursery plants through

grafting material. In order to achieve these objectives, we analyzed the cultivable part of the fungal community that inhabits the wood of both healthy and esca-symptomatic grapevine plants, as well as the cultivable part of the fungal community that is associated with the wood of nursery plants. In this respect, it is important that

the latter were not hot water treated and were grafted on identical rootstock as adult plants using shoots of apparently healthy material sampled from the same experimental adult vineyard. Materials and methods Grapevine plant selection and isolation of fungal strains from Vitis vinifera wood The Agroscope Changins-Wädenswil (Federal Research TCL Station in Agronomy, Switzerland) has surveyed a number of vineyards for the presence of esca foliar symptoms and occurrence of apoplexy since 2002. Among these vineyards, we chose a plot of 1134 grapevine plants of a Chasselas cultivar grafted on rootstock 3309 in Perroy (Lavaux) suffering a 5.5 % incidence of esca foliar symptoms in 2009, the year of the experiment (Online Resource 1). Interested by the transition from asymptomatic to symptomatic plants, we sampled only plants expressing the esca foliar symptoms for the first time since the beginning of the vineyard survey, 38 adult plants (15–30 years old), and 69 plants that had not expressed any signs of esca disease since 2002. Interested in the transmission of esca-related fungi during the grafting process, we also isolated fungi from 73 nursery plants made by the vineyard grower himself, who cultivates his own rootstock.