These pages are about viruses and phytoplasmas that infect apples, pears, plums, strawberries and numerous other wild or cultivated plants and that are of major concern by the European Plant Protection Organization and the European plant protection legislation (EC directive 2000/29/EC, 436 KB PDF-file).

In these pages we collect and present essential information (visual symptoms, host range, sequence information, currently available detection and elimination procedures) about each pathogen.

In a world of free trade and in an European Union with free movement of plant material, not only the detection of infected plant material - with the coherent consequence of its destruction - is important, but also the ways and means leading to the production of healthy planting material, which in the end is, what the growers should use increasingly for establishing new orchards.

The Plant Biotechnology Unit at the Institute of Applied Microbiology, University of Agricultural Sciences, Vienna, has extensive experience in the field of detection and elimination by in vitro methods of pome and stone fruit pathogens.

The Plant Pathology Unit at the Institute of Applied Microbiology was the cordinator of the European Union Project FAIR 3889 "Health certification of Rosaceous species based on disease-indexing of in vitro plants: Validation of diagnostics and diagnostic strategies.

In this project, the Plant Pathology Unit, with 7 partners, developed an in vitro reference collection of the most relevant pathogens affecting fruit trees. Protocols for detection and elimination were developed, and papers reporting the work were published.


The pages were created by Wolfgang Arthofer, Sabine Strommer, Veronika Hanzer, Duarte Mendonça, Richard Gölles, Stefan Brazda and Margit Laimer, the plant virology team at the IAM.


We would like to thank

• Dr. Jean-Claude Desvignes (Ctifl) for providing pictures of virus symptoms from his book "Virus Diseases of Fruit Trees" (1999).
• Dr. Bill Howell ( Washington State University) for kindly allowing us to include information from the webpage of the National Research Support Project 5.
• Prof. Nazia Loi ( Dipartimento di Biologia Applicata alla Difesa delle Piante, Università di Udine) for sharing with us the detection procedure for Apple Proliferation by Immunofluorescence and valuable discussions.
• Our partners in the FAIR 3889 project for providing the information on pages signed with the EU logo.