First Report of Gray Mold of Strawberry Caused by <i>Botrytis cinerea</i> in South Carolina
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gray mold caused by Botrytis spp. is one of the most economically important diseases of cultivated strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa) worldwide. From April to June 2011, strawberries with symptoms resembling gray mold disease were collected from different locations (Chesnee, Florence, Lexington, McBee, Monetta, and North Augusta) in South Carolina. Fruit infections began as small, firm, light brown lesions that enlarged quickly, becoming covered with a gray, fuzzy mass of spores followed by a soft rot. To isolate the causal agent, spores from symptomatic fruit were suspended in 1% Tween 20, streaked onto the surface of potato dextrose agar plates, and incubated at 22°C. Fungal colonies from single spores were at first colorless and later became gray to brown when the conidiphores and conidia developed. Conidia were identified by their morphological characteristics: an average size of 14 × 9 μm, ellipsoid to rounded without internal structure, and with a scar on the point of union to the conidiophore (1). Sclerotia produced in culture were hard, dark, irregular shaped, and formed after 2 weeks. The pathogen was identified as Botrytis cinerea Pers.: on the basis of morphology and confirmed by a restriction digest with ApoI of the 413-kb PCR amplification product obtained with BA2f/BA1r primers (2). Koch's postulates were conducted by inoculating 10 surface-sterilized strawberries with a conidial suspension (105 spores/ml) of a randomly chosen B. cinerea isolate previously characterized; 10 control fruit received sterile water without conidia. The inoculated fruit were incubated for 3 days at room temperature in air-tight plastic bags. Inoculated fruit developed typical gray mold symptoms with gray sporulating lesions. The developing spores on inoculated fruit were confirmed to be B. cinerea. All control fruit remained healthy. For many Botrytis spp., the internal transcribed spacer region does not reveal nucleotide variations and thus is useless for species identification. We used additional, more appropriate genetic markers for molecular-based species identification and verified that strawberries in South Carolina are affected by gray mold disease caused by B. cinerea. To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of B. cinerea causing gray mold of strawberry in South Carolina. References: (1) W. R. Jarvis. Botryotinia and Botrytis Species: Taxonomy, Physiology and Pathogenicity. A Guide to the Literature. Monograph no. 15. Canada Department of Agriculture, Research Branch, Ottawa, 1977. (2) K. Nielsen et al. Plant Dis. 86:682, 2002.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".