The fire blight prevalence on different varieties of apple trees in the main industrial zone of horticulture (south and south-east of Kazakhstan)

Abstract

Apple is the most significant fruit in Kazakhstan, as well as in many other countries of the world. According to the Statistics Agency in 2020, the apple cultivation area in Kazakhstan is about 36 thousand hectares with a gross har-vest of 259.1 thousand tons. The fire blight of fruit crops, in particular apple trees, is one of the most harmful infectious diseases, rapidly spreading and cre-ating a constant threat to the apple plantations of Kazakhstan. In order to avoid the further spread of fire blight in the territory of Kazakhstan, it is very important to grow varieties of fruit trees resistant to fire blight. The article pre-sents the results on the spread of fire blight on zoned, introduced, and promis-ing apple varieties in plantations of the main industrial zone of horticulture (Turkestan, Zhambyl, Almaty regions). As a result of the bacteriological analy-sis of the selected samples, 8 bacterial isolates were extracted from the varieties such as Aport, Voskhod, Sinap Almaty, Maksat, Golden Delicious, Kon-fetnoye, Pinova, Pink Lady, which, and were like the causative agent of fire blight by morphological and cultural characteristics. Bacterial pathogenicity testing on immature apple fruit showed positive test results confirming the presence of the bacterium Erwinia amylovora, the causative agent of fire blight.