Yellow mosaic virus disease of Ridge gourd caused by begomovirus is a major constraint in cucurbits cultivation. Ridge gourd yellow mosaic virus (YMV) was transmitted to healthy ridge gourd plants only by the whitefly, Bemisia tabaci and not through sap inoculation. Even a single viruliferous whitefly was able to cause 20.00 per cent infection but 100 per cent infection was obtained when 10 whiteflies were used per plant. YMV disease was successfully transmitted through B. tabaci whitefly which were given 12 h of Threshold Acquisition access period (AAP) and inoculation period. The percentage of transmission increased with increase in both acquiisition and inoculation feeding periods. Ten adult B. tabaci whiteflies were sufficient to cause 100 % transmission and the whitefly retained the infectivity up to be 6-9 days.
YMV, ridge gourd, whitefly, virus-vector relationships.
© The Author(s) 2016. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, sharing, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.