Abstract
Pepper mild mottle virus (PMMoV) in the soil can be detected by double antibody sandwich enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (DAS-ELISA) (Ikegashira et al., 2004) with great sensitivity. A PMMoV-disease risk assessment system, based on DAS-ELISA measurements of the virus in field soils, was developed to obtain a better understanding of PMMoV-contamination levels in pepper fields. When the DAS-ELISA was used on soils collected from five locations in the field, the greatest value correlated significantly with the incidence of PMMoV disease. To estimate the threshold of disease incidence in consecutive cultivations, we used DAS-ELISA for soils collected from 72 pepper fields after cultivation. The viruliferous soils had an absorbance over 0.1 in the DAS-ELISA, correlating with the disease incidence during the next cultivation, whereas most of the nonviruliferous soils were below this value. Taken together, our results showed that measuring the virus in soils from pepper fields using the DAS-ELISA system, just before cultivation, is useful for assessing the risk of disease from PMMoV.
