Title

Host Infection beyond the Traditional Range of Sclerotium (Athelia) rolfsii with Physalis minima

Authors

Subhadip Nandi^{1, 2}, Satyajit Hembaram^2, Arindam Adhikari², Basant Kumar Tiwari³, Subrata Dutta^2*

Affiliation

¹Department of Plant Protection, PSB, Visva-Bharati, Sreeniketan, Birbhum, West Bengal, India;

²AICRP on Vegetable crops, Directorate of Research, B.C.K.V, Kalyani, Nadia, West Bengal, India;

³Centre for Bioinformatics, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry- 605 014, India;

Email

subrata_mithu@yahoo.co.in

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received August 4, 2017; Revised August 21, 2017; Accepted August 21, 2017; Published October 31, 2017

Physalis minima is an herbaceous plant and inhabitant of the porous and organic matter containing soil of bunds in crop fields, wastelands, around the houses, and on the roadsides. S. rolfsii is soil borne and it can infect over 500 plant species of different families. It is of interest to study the pathogenesis of S. rolfsii on P. minima. The S. rolfsii isolated from P. minima (physr1) was characterized by morphology and sequence of Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) region. The population structure determination and phylogenetic analysis showed the isolate physr1 significantly differs from other isolates. The null hypothesis of equal evolutionary rate was rejected throughout the Maximum likelihood (ML) tree topology of different S. rolfsii ITS sequences. The site-specific mean (relative) evolutionary rate analysis showed that most of the sites (80.59 % sites) evolved at a slower rate than average. Finally, the result of Tajima’s neutrality test indicated that the population of S. rolfsii has recently begun to expand and that’s why the pathogen was infecting the new host P. minima and pose a serious threat of infecting several other cropped and non-cropped hosts.

Keywords

Physalis minima, Sclerotium rolfsii, Internal Transcribed Spacer region, Molecular clock, Site specific evolutionary rate, KC543584

Citation

Nandi et al. Bioinformation 13(10): 333-338 (2017)

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.