Isolation and Morphological Characterization of Sclerotium rolfsiiInciting Stem rot Disease in Groundnut (Arachis hypogaea L .)

Abstract

Sclerotium rolfsii is a highly threatening pathogen,affecting more than 500 hosts worldwide. In the present study, ten different isolates of Sclerotium rolfsii were isolated from groundnut growing regions of Tamil Nadu, and their morphological characteristics were observed on potato dextrose agar (PDA) medium. The virulent isolate SR-8 produced pure white with thin mycelia growth, very fast growing mycelium, dark brown colored sclerotia, and the highest number of sclerotia /plate (538). The pathogenicity test was conducted on pot-cultured, grown groundnut plants. The virulent isolate SR-8, S. rolfsii, is infected at various stages of its growth and development in groundnut plants. Lipid peroxidation and pathogenicity are crucial to identify the virulent nature of the pathogen. The pathogenicity of the virulent isolate SR-8 that produced the highest disease incidence was 89.29 % and had a high amount of lipid peroxidation of 0.9589 µmol/g. The least virulent isolates produced the minimum amount of lipid peroxidation and disease incidence. All the ten isolates exhibited different cultural and morphological characteristics, lipid peroxidation rates, and various levels of disease incidence on groundnut.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.000628

Pages

19 - 26

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

Keywords