The book on molecular characterization of tomato leaf curl virus is a part of Bandita s master s research conducted at Assam Agricultural University, Assam under the guidance of Dr Palash Deb Nath. The tropical climate in Assam allows year round tomato cropping, which together with the presence of perennial host plant for both ToLCVs and vector, Bemisia tabaci enables the easy carryover of ToLCV between growing seasons. Symptoms of ToLCV include leaf curling, vein clearing, reduction in leaf size, stunting, purple colouration, reduced fruits size etc. It was important that viruses occurring in a specific geographical area were identified and characterized prior to developing sustainable, environment friendly disease management programmes. ToLCV specific primer pairs ToLCV2 yielded a 348 bp PCR product. The product was sequenced and the sequence similarity of the ToLCV (Jorhat isolate) was compared with different ToLCV isolates of India and abroad using Nucleotide BLAST programme at National Centre for Bioinformatics (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). The similarity search results suggested that the ToLCV Jorhat isolate falls under monopartite genome.

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Ms Bandita Thakuria has obtained her M. Sc (Agri) in Plant Pathology from Assam Agricultural University, Assam. Dr Palash Deb Nath is a Professor at AAU, Assam. He was a recipient of outstanding Ph. D thesis research award from IRRI, Philippines in 1999. He did his post doctorate from UK. He published more than 20 reserach publication and a book.