When was rose mosaic virus first observed?
The bold face was added by me for emphasis (H.Kuska).
The 1962 American Rose Annual has an article titled "Viruses on Roses. by Philip Brierley, (Pathologist, Ornamentals Investigations, Beltsville, Maryland) It was reprinted with permission from the 1953 Yearbook of Agriculture Plant Diseases. The article states: "........ "Transmission of a chlorotic disorder by grafting from rose to rose was reported by M. Vibert in France as early as 1863." He then mentions 2 reports (by different authors) in Bulgaria, and one in Czechoslovakia (but does not give the dates).
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The following appeared in The 1964 issue of The American Rose Annual.
The article was written by Jack A. Traylor, H. Keith Wagnon, and Harold E.
Williams, California Department of Agriculture.
".......If the history of horticultural crops is closely examined, one can
help but note references to old important varieties which have been discarded.
Some of these old-time clones were discarded because they gradually declined in
their ability to produce. In the simple terminology of the farmer, the varieties
just "ran out." Long-time rose propagators can point to certain old
roses which once performed well in the nursery or greenhouse but now are lacking
in vigor - in effect, too have "run out." Although the "running
out" of the various horticultural clones cannot, in all cases, be
attributed to virus infection research workers have shown viruses to be a
primary contributor. Some clones have gone through a gradual decline while
others have declined more rapidly. Man's inadvertent use of virus-contaminated
propagation material can bring about a slow decline in over-all production
through the gradual infection of a clone. The process can be speeded up when
there is an efficient insect or nematode vector to assist in moving the virus
from infected plants to healthy plants in the field.
In the last 20 years, great strides have been made in the study of plant
viruses. Concentrated work on virus diseases in potatoes, strawberries,
raspberries, grapevines, cherries, apricots, peaches, plums and citrus have
clearly shown the detrimental effects of virus diseases. Evidence of one
graft-transmissible disorder in rose dates back 1863 but it was not
until a much later date that viruses were shown to be the causative agents of
diseases in roses. Perhaps the first determined efforts to demonstrate viruses
in roses in the United States were in the late 1920's when much controversy
developed about the cause of "infectious chlorosis" of rose, a
disease now known as rose mosaic. Following this work, there have been various
reports on rose viruses, both in the United States and in foreign countries.
The number of different viruses which occur naturally in roses is yet to be
determined, however, reports to date indicate six to ten. The recognition of
plant viruses is greatly dependent upon visual symptoms and plant pathologists
working on rose virus diseases under different climatic conditions in widely
separated areas of the world have been unable to properly compare the results of
their work. This causes much hesitation and confusion in the identification of
the viruses. All of the rose viruses have been demonstrated to be graft-transmissible
and, although the plant pathologists cannot always agree on the identity of
viruses, the fact remains that graft-transmission tests are reliable tools for
virus control programs in determining the presence of a virus......"
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In the 1969 issue of the British Rose Annual, Professor J. Colhoun, University of Manchester, in an article titles "Rose Viruses - The Present State of Knowledge" states:
"Evidence of the existence of a graft transmissible chlorosis of the rose was provided in France as long ago as 1863." Later he states: "Rose Mosaic. This is the name now given to the disease originally described as infectious chlorosis."
The above paper was part of a group of papers (pages 149-157) in a symposium titled "Rose Virus" Chairman: Professor L. Broadbent, Bath University, University of Technology.
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