Articles
THE EFFICACY OF FOUR ANTIVIRAL COMPOUNDS IN THE ELIMINATION OF NARCISSUS VIRUSES DURING MERISTEM TIP CULTURE
Azauracil was phytotoxic at all concentrations, whilst vidarabine was phytotoxic at 100 mg/l to the three cultivars (Aflame, Carlton and Quirinus) tested.
After two growing seasons, the five surviving plantlets of Aflame and 22 of Carlton, derived from 100 and 154 meristems, respectively, all indexed virus-positive – Aflame with narcissus virus Q (NVQ) and Carlton with arabis mosaic virus (ArMV). However, six of 17 surviving Quirinus plantlets originally infected with NVQ indexed virus-negative.
These were divided between three of the compounds – vidarabine (33 mg/l), amantadine hydrochloride (100 mg/l) and guanidine hydrochloride (333 mg/l).
A second experiment using vidarabine at 33 mg/l to test the effect on meristems of 22 narcissus cultivars, resulted in the development of 29 plantlets of ten cultivars from a total of 313 meristems.
Of these, 26 (nine cultivars) indexed virus negative; three plantlets of cv.
Minnow remained infected with narcissus tip necrosis virus (NTNV).
Narcissus yellow stripe virus, narcissus latent virus and at least two unidentified but morphologically similar viruses were eliminated from infected cultivars without the use of antiviral compounds; narcissus mosaic virus and NTNV were eliminated from one cultivar each whilst two others (Counsellor and Golden Ducat) remained infected with NVQ and ArMV, respectively.