CHARACTERIZATION OF COLLETOTRICHUM ACUTATUM, THE CAUSAL SPECIES OF ANTHRACNOSE OF STRAWBERRY AND OTHER HOSTS IN BULGARIA

Strawberry anthracnose was first reported in Bulgaria in 2002. Since then, the disease has reached epidemic levels in production fields.
More than one-hundred Colletotrichum cultures were isolated from different strawberry cultivars, pepper and tomato fruits, and the weed species Cirsium arvense that were cultivated in close proximity with infected strawberry field crops.
The Colletotrichum isolates were identified and characterized by classical morphological criteria and by various molecular methods.
Morphological characterization identified all the tested isolates as C. acutatum, which was further confirmed by species-specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification using the universal ITS4 and CaInt2 primers.
No PCR products were amplified using C. gloeosporoides specific primers.
Arbitrarily-primed PCR determined that all the studied isolates were uniform, regardless of origin of plant species, indicating that they belong to an asexually reproducing population.
Sequence analysis of the complete internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region confirmed that the populations belonged to the species C. acutatum. Pathogenicity tests using representative isolates caused cross infections on the respective alternative hosts.
These findings emphasize that various crops including weeds may serve as a potential inoculum source for C. acutatum.

VI International Strawberry Symposium

M. Maymon, Z.J. Jelev, S.G. Bobev, D. Minz, S. Freeman

Colletotrichum gloeosporioides, Fragaria ananassa, percent sequence similarity, rDNA and ITS sequence analysis, host specificity

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2009.842.27