Zhixiang Zhao¹ , Wanrong Yan¹ , Min Xiao¹ , Tongbin Xiao² , Fei Lei²

1 Institute of Plant Protection of Hainan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Hainan Key Laboratory for Control of Plant Diseases and Insect Pests, Scientific Observation and Experiment Station of Crop Pests in HaiKou, Ministry of Agriculture, Haikou, 571100, P.R. China
2 Institute of Agro-Environment and Soil of Hainan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Hainan Key Laboratory of Arable Land Conservation, Haikou, 571100, P.R. China
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Pathogens, 2021, Vol. 12, No. 2   doi: 10.5376/mp.2021.12.0002
Received: 16 Nov., 2021    Accepted: 19 Nov., 2021    Published: 25 Nov., 2021

This article was first published in Molecular Plant Breeding in Chinese, and here was authorized to translate and publish the paper in English under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Zhao Z.X., Yan W.R., Xiao M., Xiao T.B., and Lei F., 2021, Molecular identification of pathogens causing root rot of Camellia oleifera in tropical, Molecular Pathogens, 12(2): 1-10 (doi:10.5376/mp.2021.12.0002)

Root rot of Camellia oleifera is a common root disease which has become one of the main diseases affecting the production of Camellia Oleifera oil in Hainan. In order to understand the pathogenic species and their diversity, and then to find out effective prevention strategies, increase the rate of forestation in Hainan, the root rot of the pathogen was initiated by the methods of morphological analysis, molecular identification and Phylogenetic analysis Root rot samples were collected from Yunlong, Wuzhi Mountain, Tongshi, Hongshan, Qiongzhong, Baisha, Wenchang, and so on. The pathogen of Camellia oleifera root rot disease was studied by routine tissue separation and purification, morphological identification, DNA sequence determination and analysis of ITS. At the same time, methods of comparing Blast in Genbank database, building the system evolutionary tree, and  phylogenetic analysis were used in this research. Morphological identification, molecular identification, and subsequent phylogenetic analysis showed that there were two pathogens of Camellia Oleifera root rot in Hainan, one was Fusarium oxysporum, the other was Fusarium proliferatum. And Fusarium proliferatum was the major pathogenic type. Morphology on the representative strains could be divided into two classes, purple pigment and brown pigment. Sequence alignment and phylogenetic analysis found that the purple pigment representative strains were 100% sequence similarity with Fusarium proliferatum, and get together on the same branch; Brown pigment representative strains were 100% sequence similarity with Fusarium oxysporum, and get together on the same branch. This is the first report of Camellia Oleifera root rot caused by two or more pathogens alone or combined infection. The results of this study will be helpful to the breeding of Camellia Oleifera resistance and the research of its pathogenic mechanism.

Camellia oleifera; Root rot disease; Molecular identification; Phylogenetic analysis