Abstract

During spring 2016 commercial lettuce and Swiss chard plants, exhibiting disease symptoms suggestive of possible phytoplasma infection, were collected together with asymptomatic plants in Metropolitana and Arica y Parinacota regions of Chile, respectively. Nucleic acids extracted from leaf midribs were used for phytoplasmas detection. Nested polymerase chain reaction allowed the amplification of bands of the expected size only from symptomatic samples. Restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis, cloning, and sequencing allowed the identification of 16SrIII-J phytoplasmas in both plant species.