Nicoletta Contaldo is a plant pathology researcher at the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna (UNIBO), Italy. She started her academic career working with plant viruses, studying the molecular mechanisms involved in plant-virus interactions and in the last 15 years she has been working with phytoplasma and phytoplasmas-associated diseases, focusing on their biology and epidemiology. Her research activity is aimed to phytoplasma taxonomy and their molecular characterization, using all the available molecular techniques and she eventually succeeded in phytoplasma in vitro cultivation, depositing also a patent about this topic. She collaborated with several international scientific groups, in the framework of different European projects and she is currently one of the three curators of the phytoplasma database within the project EPPO-QBANK.
Grapevine Yellows (GY) is present in grapevine growing regions all over the world, leading to grapevine and wine losses of up to 60%. This disease is associated with several phytoplasmas and its epidemiological cycles show regional variation due to phytoplasma and insect vector diversity. The most commonly detected phytoplasmas associated with severe GY epidemics are ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma solani’, ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma pruni’-related, ‘Candidatus Phytoplasma asteris’-related and the “flavescence dorée”.
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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 727459.