These viruses can infect plants without causing any visible symptoms. Eventually, symptoms can include severe yield reduction, stunting, ring spots, leaf rolling, wilting and death.
Crops infected with Hop Latent Viroid and other viruses could yield up to 50% less cannabinoid and terpene production.
Viruses are even detected in seeds and are easily spread and difficult to kill. Once a grow room is infected with one of these common viruses, the infection can spread very quickly within the room and is easily transported to other rooms via clothes, snips and other tools.
It is important to screen mother plants to ensure clean clones and we recommend testing any new clones from external sources. We test for viruses using an RT-PCR microarray based RNA detection.
Hop Latent Viroid (HLVd) is an infectious pathogen that causes disease in cannabis and hop plants. The “latent” term in the name represents its characteristic to lie dormant in plants for a longtime without exhibiting symptoms. Because HLVd can be asymptomatic, a diagnostic screening test is the quickest way to identify its presence. The effect of the disease is often referred to as dudding, with symptoms that include stunted trichome production, abnormal branching, reduced vigor, and low yield. Infections typically spread when infected clones are added to a previously healthy growing environment. HLVd can also spread by mechanical transmission such as pruning tools.
Results are typically provided next day.
Hop latent viroid (HLVd)
Lettuce chlorosis virus (LCV)
Beet curly top virus (BCTV)
Cannabis cryptic virus (CanCV)
Tobacco streak virus (TSV)
Arabis mosaic virus (ArMV)
Alfalfa mosaic virus (AMV)
Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV)
Cucumber mosaic virus (CMV)