Screening of tomato varieties/cultivars against Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. lycopersici causing wilt of tomato

Introduction

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is widely cultivated vegetable crop in the world. It is a self-pollinated solanaceous vegetable crop grown in open field as well as under protected cultivation into different cropping system in tropical and temperate regions throughout the world. It is a native of Tropical America (Thompson and Kelly, 1957) [11] and was introduced in India by the Portuguese during 1700 (Kale and Kale, 1994) [5] . The wilt caused by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. lycopersici (Sacc) Synder and Hans is most important world wide disease of tomato, was first described in England in 1895 and has been reported from 32 countries (Srinon et al., 2006) [9] . It is a serious constraint in the production of tomato and causes considerable yield losses up to 45 percent in India (Ramyabharathi et al. 2012) [6,7] . The symptoms are characterized by wilted plants, yellowed lower and younger leaves, leaflets or only one side of the petiole may be affected, initially vascular browning is seen in stem, roots became necrotic and some discoloration of vascular tissues resulted in minimal or no crop yield (Asha et al., 2011) [2] . The pathogen is highly destructive in both green house and field grown tomatoes. It is soil-borne in nature and produces three types of asexual spore microconidia, macroconidia and chlamydospores and survives in soil in the form of chlamydospores for decades (Haware et al., 1996) [4] . The fungus Fusarium belongs to the sub division Deuteromycotina and perfect stage is Mycosphaerella sp. It produces white aerial mycelium with pink, orange, red, blue, violet or purple pigmentation and produces slimy clump of spores (sporodochia) with blue sclerotia in culture (Liaquat et al., 2016) [12] . The management of wilt disease is difficult by conventional management practice using chemical fungicides. The popular resistant varieties of tomato are also not available and limited efforts have been done to develop resistant varieties (Abdel-Monaim et al., 2012) [1] .

Materials and Methods

Screening of tomato varieties against Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. lycopersici The eleven varieties were screened for relative resistance or susceptibility to Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. lycopersici under cage house condition. Tomato varieties namely, Pusa ruby, Tycon, Sulabh, Sarathi, Shakti, To-1057, NHT-1813, MAHY-302, Emrol, Arka samrat, KSP-1154 were purchased from National Seed Corporation (NSC), Udaipur (Rajasthan). Seedlings were raised for each variety in sterilized soil separately and maintained up to transplanting. For the experimentation pure culture of Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. lycopersici isolates were multiplied separately on corn meal-sand medium (1:3) in flasks at 28+2 °C for 15 days. The sterilized soil were filled in earthen pots and inoculated by mixing pathogen inoculum @ 50 g/kg soil and were kept in cage house condition. Four pots as four replications were maintained for each variety. All the pots were lightly irrigated immediately after inoculation to allow establishment of the pathogen for one week, keeping four pots as four replications for each isolate. For comparison, control pots were kept without inoculation. Forty five days old five seedlings of each test variety were transplanted in sick and control pots and were irrigated at regular time interval. The wilt incidence in form of plant mortality for each variety was observed and recorded at 30 days of transplanting.

The percent plant mortality (wilting) was recorded and categorized as per the disease reaction scales

Reaction

Discussion

The eleven popular tomato varieties namely, Tycon, Sulabh, Sarathi, Shakti, TO-1057, NHT-1813, MAHY-302, Emrold, Arka Samrat, KSP-1154 and Pusa ruby were screened for resistance against F. o. f. sp. lycopersici in pots under cage house condition. The observation in respect of disease expression among different varieties with incidence ranging from 10.03-85.00 percent was recorded. The tomato varieties, Arka samrat was highly resistant (10.03 percent) and Tycon (27.50 percent) observed as moderately resistant while, Emrold (85.00 percent) and Sarathi (75.02 percent) were highly susceptible and Sulabh (55.03 percent), TO-1057 (67.54 percent), NHT-1813 (67.50 percent), KSP-1154 (55.02 percent) were susceptible, while Shakti (42.50 percent), MAHY-302 (47.50 percent), Pusa ruby (50.04 percent) were moderately susceptible. None of the variety was immune. Similarly, Terna et al., (2017) [10] , Chopada et al., (2014) [3] also screened tomato varieties for resistance to FOL-7 isolate in pots, and reported that the varieties NS-2535, Heamsona and GT-2 were moderately resistant with 33.33, 33.33 and 46.67 percent wilt incidence while, GT-1 (73.33 percent), Pusa early dwarf (66.67 percent), AND-1 (66.67 percent), PKM-1 (60.00 percent) and DT-11 (55.67 percent) varieties showed wilt incidence between 50.00 to 74.00 percent and were categorized as moderately susceptible.

Conclusion

Based on the experimentation it could be concluded that in eleven variety The Arka Samrat variety was found most resistant against wilt of tomato. The maximum wilt incidence (85.00%) was noticed in variety Emrold while, minimum 10.03 percent incidence was noticed in variety Arka Samrat.

References

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