Tomato
Diseases

Tomato cultivars vary widely in their resistance to disease. Modern hybrids focus on improving disease resistance over the heirloom plants.

Various forms of mildew and blight are common tomato afflictions, which is why tomato cultivars are often marked with a combination of letters that refer to specific disease resistance. The most common letters are:

A common tomato disease is tobacco mosaic virus. Handling cigarettes and other infected tobacco products can transmit the virus to tomato plants.

Another particularly dreaded disease is curly top, carried by the beet leafhopper, which interrupts the lifecycle. As the name implies, it has the symptom of making the top leaves of the plant wrinkle up and grow abnormally.

Bacterial wilt is another common disease impacting yield. Wang et al., 2019 found phage combination therapies to reduce the impact of bacterial wilt, sometimes by reducing bacterial abundance and sometimes by selecting for resistant but slow growing genetics.
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