This is a crucial subject. Take a look at the photo of my plants in bloom that was uploaded above. A healthy plant is next to a plant that has numerous symptoms. While the rest of the healthy plant is stunning, a single symptomatic shoot may be seen if you look closely. Beginning with mechanical touch or pruning, this viroid. Slowly but surely, it starts to infect the new host plant. The virus spreads vertically as it moves downward through the first infected shoot and into the main stem, where it can start to infect the entire plant.
This is a further key aspect of this HPLVD virus, and it is here that solutions for mitigation are beginning to materialize. It is doubtful that both of the plants in the aforementioned image were infected during cloning. It's more plausible that the mother plant had some parts where the slow-moving viroid had already infected it and other areas where it had not. The very symptomatic plant was most likely cloned from a region of the plant with a very high viral load (we're talking 250+ million copies per milligramme of material here), whereas the healthy plant was most likely cloned from a region with a low to nil viroid load.
Results
As a result, we have a plant that exhibits severe symptoms and a plant that is not exhibiting any symptoms and may not be infected from the same mother. Plants that have been carried inside the flower room and placed close to diseased plants start to spread the disease to one another. Virion load can be transferred from high virion load plants to low virion load plants by plant-to-plant contact and mechanical trimming. This is why you could start noticing symptoms on a plant that was previously healthy, and you might even only notice HpLVd signs on a portion of that plant. With the exception of a few branches—the original infection sites—a healthy plant that experienced transmission may appear generally healthy, whether by contact or pruning.
When doing PCR testing, this is a crucial factor to take into account. When acquiring plant samples, it's crucial to collect numerous samples from different parts of the plant because a plant can test negative for an infection even though the virus load in that area is low. This is crucial to keep in mind because a negative PCR test does not guarantee that your plant (or garden) is clean. It should be noted that viroids, like viruses, are constantly evolving, therefore it is likely that there are numerous variations of the Hop Latent Viroid present in Cannabis.
How Can We Prevent HPLVd From Affecting Our Gardens?
The most important issue is to either not accept any clones from outside sources or to have a stringent quarantine strategy for incoming genetic material. The mother stock should not be connected in any way to these new genetics. When interacting with these novel genotypes, disposable gloves should be used until they have demonstrated their lack of symptoms.
Tool sterilization is a crucial step in the prevention of transmission. It is NOT the place for alcohol. Since there is no lipid capsid to dissolve, placing HpLVd-contaminated scissors in alcohol will only result in the creation of a HpLVd-contaminated solution, which is highly contaminating to other tools. You can soak for two hours in sodium hypochlorite diluted by 10% (1 part bleach, 1 part water). However, using bleach can be damaging to your steel tools. A good decontamination agent is Virkon S. The viroid can be efficiently destroyed by soaking tools in 9.5 grams to 1 liter of water for 15 to 30 minutes. Using a butane torch to disinfect instruments during pruning is an extremely efficient method. A torch is a portable gadget that can be used to sterilize shears in-between plants because heat will eliminate HpLVd. It's pretty simple to incorporate this into a pruning SOP. Although the virus's ability to survive without a plant host for more than a few hours is not known with certainty, it is believed that it cannot. Surfaces therefore represent less of a risk for infection because it is unlikely that they will harbor infectious quantities of HpLVd.
If You Think Your Garden May Have HPLVD
It is essential that you take prompt action. There should be no ifs, ands, or buts; all sick plants should be immediately removed. Limiting cross contamination is necessary. Since identification is always the first step in managing a pest or illness, you can send samples of your materials for PCR testing if you are unsure. Unless you have prior experience recognising HLVD Test Kit in the field, think twice before acting. You can spot diseased plants from a mile away if enough HpLVd has been demonstrated and experienced. Meristem tissue culture may be able to treat critical genetics, however this has not yet been proven conclusively. When Dark Heart Nursery announced the discovery of the HLVD Test Kit in 2018, they also disclosed a patent for treating infected plants. However, that invention appears to have been abandoned. They gave up on the patent, and in all honesty, it might have been nothing more than fundraising marketing.
