Plant diseases pose an enormous threat to global food security and market access. The most effective method for their management is by exclusion. High-throughput diagnostic technologies can offer improved capabilities for the detection of quarantine plant pathogens and pests. Whitefly-transmitted begomoviruses (family Geminiviridae) cause economically important diseases in a wide range of food and fibre crops worldwide. The marked emergence of begomovirus diseases over the past two decades is directly related to the globalization of trade, the adaptive capacity of the whitefly vector Bemisia tabaci and the ability of begomoviruses to evolve rapidly (via mutation and recombination) and associate with auxiliary symptom-enhancing subviral components (e.g. satellite molecules). Here we describe a 7-plex PCR-Luminex liquid bead array for the hierarchical detection of begomoviruses and biotypes of B. tabaci.
