Bacterial fruit blotch (BFB) affects cucurbit plants around the world and can be a serious threat to farmers because it spreads through contaminated seed.
[2] No known reliable sources of BFB resistance exist today, so seed hygiene and thorough testing of breeding facilities are the best way to control spreading.
Symptoms of melon with BFB include water soaked lesions on cotyledons, and hypocotyls, leading to collapse and death.
On fruit, water soaked lesions will be small and irregular (they average 1 cm diameter and may be sunken) but then progress through the rind.
[3] On adult leaves, the symptoms appear the same as the ones left by other abiotic or biotic stressors so diagnosis is not as straight forward.
The fruit typically becomes infected early in development, and shows symptoms near harvest, making diagnosis and prevention difficult.
Greenhouses are perfect environments for seed to seedling transfer of A. citrulli because it is warm, humid, and tightly filled with host plants.
Companies such as Eurofins STA Laboratories and Summit Plant Labs test seed for cleanliness.
The first report of BFB research came in 1965 when a seed-borne phytobacterium was isolated from diseased plant tissue from Turkey.
The USDA originally thought the disease was exclusively in seedlings, however the first BFB outbreak in 1987 proved that entire fields could be lost to fruit decay.
Today, many outbreaks in the United States result in 90-100% fruit loss per diseased field, prompting lawsuits by farmers over contaminated seed.
BFB is a unique disease because its late discovery gives scientists an opportunity to track the outbreak from the start.
Therefore, BFB provides an opportunity to better understand how to track these interactions in real time while this disease spreads.