Temporal Dispersal Patterns of , Causal Agent of Petri Disease and Esca, in Vineyards.

Although the fungus is the most commonly detected causal agent of Petri disease and esca, two important fungal grapevine trunk diseases, little is known about the dispersal patterns of inoculum. In this work, we studied the dispersal of airborne inoculum from 2016 to 2018 in two viticultural areas of eastern (Ontinyent) and northern (Logroño) Spain. The vineyards were monitored weekly from November to April using microscope slide traps, and was detected and quantified by a specific real-time quantitative (qPCR) method set up in this work. The method was found to be sensitive, and a good correlation was observed between numbers of conidia (counted by microscope) and DNA copy numbers (quantified by qPCR). We consistently detected DNA of at both locations and in all seasons but in different quantities. In most cases, DNA was first detected in the last half of November, and most of the DNA was detected from December to early April. When rain was used as a predictor of DNA detection in traps, false-negative detections were observed, but these involved only 4% of the total. The dispersal pattern of DNA over time was best described ( = 0.765 and concordance correlation coefficient = 0.870) by a Gompertz equation, with time expressed as hydrothermal time (a physiological time accounting for the effects of temperature and rain). This equation could be used to predict periods with a high risk of dispersal of .