Vol. 12, Special Issue 7 (2023)

Author(s):
Gururaj Sunkad, Deepa Dore, Meghana Patil, Ranjana Joshi and Mediga Kasi Rao

Abstract:
Dry root rot is becoming an emerging endemic and economically important soil borne disease of chickpea in Karnataka. Rhizoctonia bataticola, is a soil borne fungus resulting in significant yield losses. Hence, the present investigation was carried out to understand the pathogen characters and diversity of its isolates under changing climatic scenario. Sixty isolates of R. bataticola were isolated from disease samples collected from different geographic regions of Karnataka and subjected to cultural and morphological diversity analysis using standard methodologies. Later, twenty representative isolates were studied for molecular characterization using universal ITS primers and sequencing was done for eight isolates. Finally, genetic diversity analysis was carried out by RAPD primers. All sixty isolates showed variation with respect to cultural and morphological characters. Universal ITS primers produced amplified product size of 550- 600 bp in all the twenty isolates indicating that isolates belong to Rhizoctonia bataticola. Further, nucleotide equencing was done for ITS region of 18S rRNA in eight isolates pathogen selected from eight geographic regions. Four random RAPD primers generated reproducible polymorphism and amplified products with all the primers showed polymorphic and distinguishable banding pattern indicating the genetic diversity among twenty representative isolates of R. bataticola.