Effect of seed treatment practices in controlling of seed-borne fungi in sorghum

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to study the effectiveness in controlling seed borne fungi associated with sorghum seeds obtained from two locations at the Seed Pathology Centre (SPC), Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU), Mymensingh. All the five seed treatment practices used viz. hot water treatment, garlic tablet, neem leaf extract, BAU- Biofungicide and Vitavax-200 reduced significantly the total seed-borne fungal infections as well as the population of individual six target pathogenic fungi- Agrostis tenuis, Bipolaris sorghicola, Botrytis cinerea, Crinum graminicola, Curvularia lunata, Fusarium moniliforme. Increased germination higher than the national standard (>80.0%) was also obtained in all the treatments over the untreated control. Vitavax-200 gave the best result in controlling seed-borne infection of all the individual target pathogenic fungi followed by garlic tablet, hot water treatment and neem leaf extract. Neem leaf extract gave over 90.0% reduction in seed-borne infection of B. sorghicola and C. lunata out of the six target pathogenic fungi. BAU-Biofungicide gave the lowest control of total seed-borne fungal infections (61.6 - 62.3%) as well as seed-borne infection of all the individual target pathogenic fungi (<80.0%). Key words: Seed treatment practice, control, seed borne fungi, sorghum.