Feeding the growing world population faces with several challenges including the limitation of appropriate agricultural land, climate change and social demands for healthy food and environment preservation. According to the FAO reports, more than one billion people around the world are currently suffering from starvation and malnutrition. It is now stablished that plant pathogens, pests and weeds are of the most important factors that affect the agricultural crop yield and quality worldwide. Perhaps the climate change and particularly global warming and increasing level of the greenhouse gas, CO₂, are the biggest challenges for the agriculture of todays and future. It enhances soil erosion, shortage of sufficient water, loose of agricultural lands, pooleward movement of plant pests and the emergence and/or re-emergence of plant pathogens and pests. It is commonly accepted that plant pests and diseases and weeds play important negative roles in agricultural production and human feeding.

Damages to the quality and quantity of crops could be decreased by application of agricultural practices and other control measures including synthetic pesticides and biological agents. However, application of pesticides, as the most prominent control strategy, is not accepted in green agriculture and is useless in controlling vascular pathogens including viruses and phytoplasmas. For the latter pathogens, prevention from infection and control of insect vectors are the only known control strategies. However, as these pathogens transmit in grafting materials, the original planting materials (e.g. nuclear stocks) should be virus-free before further multiplication.

Sanitation of planting materials to obtain “virus-free” clones could be achieved by several methods including heat therapy, cryotherapy, meristem tip culture alone or in combination with chemotherapy. Co-application of tissue culture technologies with one or several therapy means is commonly accepted as they result in more success in terms of sanitation and regeneration. However, this method (s) suffers from somatic mutations and maintain of some viral pathogens in planting materials after treatment.

Here in our institute, we used an alternative strategy to produce “virus-tested” planting materials. First, candidate true-to-type fruit tree plants and vegetative stocks were checked for vascular pathogens according to national health standards of fruit trees using serological and molecular approaches. The healthy materials were used for grafting and the infected ones were removed. The resulted saplings were kept in insect-proof screen house for two years and tested for systemic pathogens by several techniques and the suspected plants were removed. The plants that fully passed detection methods and revealed as virus-tested, were delivered to producers for multiplication. This strategy were successfully applied for local cultivars including appricot (19), peach (3), nectarin (2) and olive (7). As none of the above mentioned sanitation processes used, no somatic variation are happened and are fully free from the vascular pathogens that tested for.