ISOLATION AND MOLECULAR IDENTIFICATION OF SOME ISOLATES OF Sclerotinia sclerotiorum ISOLATED FROM EGGPLANT (Solanum melongena L.)

This study was conducted in the laboratory of Plant Virology-Faculty of Agriculture-University of Kerbala, to isolate and diagnose six fungal isolates infecting eggplants (Solanum melongena) in some greenhouses located in Najaf Governorate/ Al-Hirah district. These isolates were diagnosed using the polymerase chain reaction technology (PCR), with the presence of the primer pair ITS1and ITS4, and determining the nucleotide sequences of the PCR products amplified from those isolates.

It was revealed by analyzing the nucleotide sequences of the PCR products using the BLAST program (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) that all the fungal isolates (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6) belong to the fungus Sclerotinia sclerotiorum. Among these fungal isolates, S. sclerotiorum (5) showed a similarity rate of 99% with the other isolates of S. sclerotiorum (1, 2, 3, 4, and 6) isolated in this study as well as with other isolates previously recorded in the National for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) with similarity ratios ranged between 90-99%, including those isolates registered in China (MH393290), (KM272343), India (MN538308), and Bangladesh (LC484433). Therefore, the isolate of S. sclerotiorum (5) has been recorded in NCBI under accession numbers MW898245. Furthermore, the analysis of the sequence of nucleotide sequences of the PCR products using BLAST proved that the two fungi isolates were diagnosed as Trichoderma longibrachiatum and Penicillium crustusum, which showed a 100% nucleotide sequence homology with many isolates previously registered in NCBI.