A Metabolomics Assay to Diagnose Citrus Huanglongbing Disease and to Aid in Assessment of Treatments to Prevent or Cure Infection

Abstract

Citrus greening disease, or Huanglongbing (HLB), has devastated citrus crops globally in recent years. the causal bacterium, 'Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus', presents a sampling issue for qPCR diagnostics and results in a high false negative rate. in this work, we compared six metabolomics assays to identify HLB-infected citrus trees from leaf tissue extracted from 30 control and 30 HLB-infected trees. a liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry-Based assay was most accurate. a final partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) model was trained and validated on 690 leaf samples with corresponding qPCR measures from three citrus varieties (Rio Red grapefruit, Hamlin sweet orange, and Valencia sweet orange) from orchards in Florida and Texas. Trees were naturally infected with HLB transmitted by the insect vector Diaphorina citri. in a randomized validation set, the assay was 99.9% accurate to classify diseased from nondiseased samples. This model was applied to samples from trees receiving plant defense-inducer compounds or biological treatments to prevent or cure HLB infection. from two trials, HLB-related metabolite abundances and PLS-DA scores were tracked longitudinally and compared with those of control trees. We demonstrate how our assay can assess tree health and the efficacy of HLB treatments and conclude that no trialed treatment was efficacious.

Department(s)

Chemistry

Comments

National Science Foundation, Grant T31IR1614

Keywords and Phrases

citrus; huanglongbing; mass spectrometry; metabolomics; plant diagnostics

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1943-7684; 0031-949X

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2025 American Phytopathological Society, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2024

PubMed ID

37486097

Link to Full Text

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