Morphological and molecular identification of Fusarium incarnatum as the causal agent of potato dry rot disease

El-Nagar, Asmaa S; Abdel Wahab, Mohamed Hassan; Elzaawely, Abdelnaser A.; El-zahaby, Hassan M

doi:10.21608/jsaes.2024.312734.1096

Morphological and molecular identification of Fusarium incarnatum as the causal agent of potato dry rot disease

Document Type : Original research paper

Authors

¹ Department of Agricultural Botany, Faculty of Agriculture, Tanta University, Tanta, Egypt

² Department of Agricultural Botany, Faculty of Agriculture, Tanta University, Tanta 31527, Egypt

³ Agriculture botany department, faculty of agriculture, Tanta university, Tanta, Egypt

10.21608/jsaes.2024.312734.1096

Abstract

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L., family Solanaceae), is one of the most widely consumed vegetable crops worldwide. Several phytopathogenic fungi target potato tubers during storage. Dry rot disease caused by several species of Fusarium is considered one of the most serious threats to potato tuber crops under normal or cold conditions. Herein, we isolated, characterized, and identified three isolates of Fusarium associated with dry rot of potato tubers. The morphological character-ization and microscopic examination revealed that all isolates belong to the Fusari-um genus. Moreover, all isolates were pathogenic and displayed the typical symptoms of dry rot disease on potato tuber 20 days post-inoculation. However, only one isolate (isolate #3), was the most aggressive and caused the maximum lesion di-ameter (28.00±2.00 mm) and depth (31.67±2.89 mm) in comparison to other isolates (8±2.00, 14.67±1.53, 9.67±0.58 and 13.67±1.53mm for lesion diameter and depth respectively). The most virulent isolate was subjected to further studies such as mo-lecular identification using an internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region and phyloge-netic analysis. Molecular identification showed that the tested isolate had high simi-larity with Fusarium incarnatum isolate CM9 (Gen Bank Accession No. MN186812.1; 522pb) subsequently, the sequence of this isolate (isolate #3) was up-loaded in the GenBank database under the name F. incarnatum isolate AE 2024 (GenBank Accession No. PP086049; 528 pb). Our findings suggest that one of the best ways to control plant diseases such as dry rot disease is to identify (species lev-el) of the pathogen accurately.

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