Brown spot caused by <i>Sphingomonas</i> sp. on yellow Spanish melon fruits in Spain*

Abstract

Brown fruit spot symptoms were observed on yellow Spanish melons ( Cucumis melo var. inodorus ) grown in greenhouses at Almeria in Spain. Nonsporing, motile, rod‐shaped bacteria were isolated from diseased fruits, which on nutrient agar produced small yellow colonies. Two bacterial isolates, used for further investigations, were pathogenic on fruits but not on cotyledons of Spanish melon plants. They provoked disease symptoms similar to those observed in the greenhouse. Both isolates were Gram‐negative, catalase‐positive, weakly oxidase‐positive and phenylalanine deaminase‐negative. They hydrolysed esculin but not gelatin and they utilized glucose oxidatively. Fatty acid analysis revealed that both isolates belong to the genus Sphingomonas . In addition, 16S rDNA sequence analysis, performed on one isolate, demonstrated that it had a significant sequence similarity (more than 98%) with Sphingomonas pruni and Sphingomonas mali , nonphytopathogenic bacteria isolated from plants. Although enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus PCR and repetitive extragenic palindromic PCR seem to indicate that the Sphingomonas isolates from Spanish melon fruits may belong to a new species, DNA–DNA hydridization analysis is necessary to verify this hypothesis.