Discussion
Prior to this work, the phylogenetic position of SCGS phytoplasma and its relatedness to closely related phy- toplasmas were based only on the sequence analysis of 16S/23S rDNA spacer region of the Thai strain SCGS-T and RFLP data of PCR-amplified 16S rDNA and 16S/23S rDNA spacer sequences of a few Thai and In- dian isolates (Marcone et al., 2004). Thus, the phyloge- netic relationships of SCGS phytoplasma strains to each other and to the most related phytoplasmas, at both 16S rRNA gene and 16S/23S rDNA spacer region sequence level were examined for the first time in the present work.