Welsh onion (Allium fistulosum) is an important aromatic vegetable crop, particularly in Asia (Kim et al. 2023). In November 2025, two-month-old Welsh onion plants showing leaf proliferation, little leaf, and yellowing symptoms were found at low frequency (< 1%) in Fangyuan Township, Changhua County, Taiwan. The plot was around 880 m 2 in size and about 7,200 clumps were grown. Five symptomatic and three symptomless plants were sampled (bagged separately). The plants’ basal leaf tissues were subjected to DNA extraction and PCR analysis. DNA was extracted using a Synergy 2.0 Plant DNA Extraction Kit (OPS Diagnostics) using filter tips, and the DNA samples’ quality was verified by successful amplification of a plant 26S rDNA fragment (0.7 kb) using primer pair 28KJ/28C (Cullings 1992). Nested polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays using phytoplasma 16S rDNA-specific primers were conducted. The nested primer pairs used were P1/P7 and fU5/rU3 (Lorenz et al. 1995), respectively. DNA of periwinkle infected with periwinkle leaf yellowing phytoplasma served as a positive control and no-template controls (nuclease-free water) were included in both PCR rounds. In both tests, only DNA from the five symptomatic plants produced the expected amplicons (1.8 kb and 881 bp for the outer and inner assays). The products from the first and second rounds of PCR were sequenced and assembled. Sequencing chromatograms of the PCR products had single, well-resolved peaks across all positions in all the samples, indicating that only one strain was present. Near-full-length (1,466 bp) 16S rDNA sequences of all five samples were identical to that of a reference ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma australasiaticum’-related strain, NCHU2014 (accession no. CP040925, bp 537,765 to 539,230; 16SrII-A; Rodrigues Jardim et al. 2023), and a representative sequence has been deposited in GenBank (accession no. PX696818). A 1,248 bp fragment (accession no. PX696818, bp 84 to 1,331) of the detected 16S rDNA sequence was excised for analysis using the web tool iPhyClassifier (https://plantpathology.ba.ars.usda.gov/cgi-bin/resource/iphyclassifier.cgi), and the virtual RFLP patterns obtained were identical to the reference pattern of 16SrII-A (accession no. L33765; similarity coefficient 1.00). Additional PCR tests targeting the protein translocase gene secY and the elongation factor Tu gene (tuf) of 16SrII phytoplasmas were respectively conducted with the infected samples using primer pairs SecYF1(II)/SecYR1(II) and TUF-II-F1/TUF-II-R1 (Al-Subhi et al. 2017; Lee et al. 2010). The secY (accession no. PX737873; 1,263 bp) and tuf (accession no. PX737874; 1,183 bp) sequences were again found identical to those of the reference strain NCHU2014 (16SrII-A phytoplasma; accession no. CP040925, bp 192,846 to 194,108 and bp 139,150 to 140,332). In Taiwan, 16SrII phytoplasma has been reported affecting various plants, such as seseme and purple coneflower (Rodrigues Jardim et al. 2023; Tseng et al. 2014). In A. fistulosum, however, phytoplasma infection has only been associated with group 16SrI (Cho et al. 2019). The present study is the first report of a 16SrII-A phytoplasma affecting Welsh onion and the findings expand the understanding of the width of the subgroup’s host range in the island. Since Welsh onion is an important culinary crop, and the disease significantly affects its morphology and commercial value, ongoing surveillance of its spread in other regions is warranted.
Wu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.