ABSTRACT
All organisms from unicellular prokaryotic bacteria to highly evolved human beings are affected by diseases caused by viruses. The viruses are obligate, intracellular molecular parasites, requiring the presence of living cells for their development. They were proved to be causal agents of plant diseases only in the late nineteenth century. Plant viruses remain to be elusive and enigmatic causes of several destructive crop diseases defying human efforts to restrict the incidence and spread of diseases induced by them. Although rapid advancements have been made to obtain information on various aspects of host-virus interactions, management of virus diseases is still restricted primarily to the elimination of infected seeds, propagules, and infected plants and to reducing the population of vectors spreading the viruses from infected plants to healthy plants. This situation brings into focus the imperative need for the development of techniques for rapid, reliable, specific and sensitive detection of viruses in planta, soil and water to assess the quantum of inoculum available for infection of different crops susceptible to them (Narayanasamy 2002, 2017).
