Rapid and Molecular Discrimination of Host-Specific Fungal Plant Pathogens in Pulse Crops Using Genome Profiling

A rapid and accurate identification of potential plant pathogens below the species level is highly desirable to understand the genetic basis of host-pathogen interactions and thus to effectively manage plant diseases. In this study, a genome profiling (GP) technique was applied to identify 14 common seed-borne fungal pathogens from five different legume plant hosts in Rajasthan, India. Six species belonging to different taxonomic orders were successfully identified and classified topologically to the same position with their phenotypic traits. Next, we demonstrated that GP could be used to discriminate fungal pathogenic strains below the species level by classifying 10 different strains of Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus flavus based on plant host specificity. These results suggest that accurate identification of plant pathogenic subspecies is likely to become an easier task, and the resulting GP-based database can be an ideal platform for timely and unambiguous identification of fungal species, with pathogenic or beneficial relation to plant host.