Rubidoux Quarantine Facility
Disease diagnosis takes place in the Rubidoux Quarantine Facility in an insect-proof greenhouse with temperature and light controls that are required for biological indexing. The Rubidoux Quarantine Facility is located within the city of Riverside adjacent to the original location of the Citrus Experiment Station (1907), isolated from the nearest commercial citrus and University experimental orchards by about 3 miles. It consists of approximately 5,000 square feet of screenhouse, and a modular office and lab area.
Typically, when a new import is received by CCPP at the Rubidoux Quarantine Facility, propagations are made on rough lemon rootstocks to preserve the budline and to produce budwood for future index and/or therapy. These propagations are placed in a warm greenhouse and growth is pushed. In addition, some of the imported budwood is cultivated in vitro and the produced meristems are used for the shoot-tip-micrografting procedure. The remaining portion of the same import budwood is used to graft inoculate indicator seedlings in a screening index called a pre-index. The pre-index will indicate if the import budline is infected with citrus tristeza virus, vein enation virus, psorosis or psorosis-related pathogens, or citrus viroids. A very high percentage of new imports arrive infected with one or more of these bud-transmissible diseases.
For More information, please contact:
Citrus Clonal Protection Program
Department of Plant Pathology
University of California
Riverside, CA 92521
Telephone: 951.684.8580
Fax: 951.686.5612
Email: ccpp@ucr.edu