For the past several months, we have been struggling to get a productive growth cycle for the plants growing in our growth room. the growth conditions are the same as they should be and what they used to be earlier. I tried to find an explanation for this but nothing helpful came across except for a similarity with the symptoms of turnip crinkle virus infection. Please help to identify the possible reason and remedy for the problem as it is ruining our crucial experiments. We also shut down the growth room completely, fumigated, raised the temperature for two weeks, did thorough disinfection and started with fresh growth, but are back to square one as the problem has again surfaced and we are not yet done with one generation as yet. I have attached the pictures of the affected plants.
That doesn't look like Turnip crinkle virus since there should be more foliar symptoms present. It looks like they started out growing normally but then started dying. Have you looked at the roots to see if they are healthy or not? Also, are you autoclaving the soil that you are planting in? I've had problems with fungal pathogens being in soil before that killed my plants. Switching soil and/or autoclaving the soil would be a quick fix.
I agree with A.G. Laney change the soil. Also you can treat seeds with bromine water over night at 4dgree followed by 5-6 times washing with AddH2O. Hope this will help.
@ A.G.Laney - Thanks for your suggestion, Actually we do autoclave our soil and even pots before planting. And you are right they start growing normally and the symptoms appear only after bolting.
First of all make sure you water regularly and maybe from the bottom, avoid watering on hte leaves and especially don't drown them....
Are they actually in soil or in vermiculite?
I whould be careful autoclaving soil, it also kills some benficiary microbes and allows preoliferation of a few species with heat resistant spores. Best to autoclave it twice with 2 days in between to let them germinate adn kill in the second round if you want to be sure.
Are there holes in the leaves on the right? As far as I can judge they look a bit like they were nibbled by the larvae of fungus gnat some kind of small fly that mainly eat roots but wriggle up sometimes to eat the leaves that are on soil. When you have them plants look OK for a while but show symptoms when they need more roots eg, when flowering. Although you said the room was cleaned, try that again and trap all flies with sticky paper/sticky tape or when you see them maybe even insecticide...
goodluck, keep us posted
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