Antipathy of Trichoderma against Sclerotium rolfsii Sacc.: Evaluation of Cell Wall-Degrading Enzymatic Activities and Molecular Diversity Analysis of Antagonists

The fungusTrichoderma is a teleomorph of theHypocrea genus and associated with biological control of plant diseases. The microscopic, biochemical, and molecular characterization ofTrichodermawas carried out and evaluated for in vitro antagonistic activity against the fungal pathogenSclerotium rolfsii causing stem rot disease in groundnut. In total, 11 isolates ofTrichoderma were examined for antagonism at 6 and 12 days after inoculation (DAI). Out of 11,T. virensNBAII Tvs12 evidenced the highest (87.91%) growth inhibition of the test pathogen followed byT. koningii MTCC 796 (67.03%),T. virideNBAII Tv23 (63.74%), andT. harzianumNBAII Th1 (60.44%). Strong mycoparasitism was observed in the best antagonist Tvs12 strain during 6-12 DAI. The specific activity of cell wall-degrading enzymes - chitinase and β-1,3-glucanase - was positively correlated with growth inhibition of the test pathogen. In total, 18 simple sequence repeat (SSR) polymorphisms were reported to amplify 202 alleles across 11Trichodermaisolates. The average polymorphism information content for SSR markers was found to be 0.80. The best antagonist Tvs 12 was identified with 7 unique SSR alleles amplified by 5 SSR markers. Clustering patterns of 11Trichodermastrains showed the best antagonistT. virens NBAII Tvs 12 outgrouped with a minimum 3% similarity from the rest ofTrichoderma.J Mol Microbiol Biotechnol 2017;27:22-28
Source: Journal of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology - Category: Microbiology Source Type: research