First Report of Leaf Spot Disease Caused by Alternaria brassicae on Orychophragmus violaceus in China.

Abstract

Orychophragmus violaceus, belonging to the Brassicaceae family, is widely grown in many provinces of China as an ornamental plant and also as a green manure crop. In December 2019, field investigations showed that a leaf spot disease occurred on O.violaceus with 50% to 80% incidence in Huize City, Yunnan Province of China. Infected leaves showed symptoms of small black point spots in the early stage of onset. The lesions are distributed throughout the leaves and finaly expand to 10-15 mm in diameter after 10-15 days of onset. At this time, the lesions are gray to black, and some have round patterns, and gray-white mildew layers can be seen on the front and back of the lesions in a humid environment. The leaves with typical lesion symptoms were sampled and photographed, and then subjected to isolate and characterize the pathogen. Six pure cultures (HEYA2; HEYA4; HEYC6; HEYD7; HEYD8; HEYD10) were obtained by single-hyphae isolation. On PCA medium, colony can reach 27 mm after 7d, at 25°C in darkness. Aerial hypha is cottony with white to pale gray color, while the colony reverse is fawn to dark. on V8 medium, conidiophore solitary or clustered, erect or knee-curved, occasionally branched, pare brown, separated, 82-130 × 5-9 µm. Conidia are solitary, straight or slightly curved, inverted rod-shaped, pare brown to brown, with 6-10 transverse septa, 0-5 oblique and longitudinal septa, columnar beak, conidial bodies (47.7-)69.3-103.8(-119.6)(11.2-)16.6-23.6(-27.8) µm. Beak septum, pare brown, (29.2-)34.4-72.4(-101.3)(4.2-)6.6-9.5(-11.3) µm. Morphologically these isolates resembled species belonging to genus Alternaria (Simmons, 2007). Genomic DNA of each culture was quickly extracted from mycelia using QS method (Chi et al. 2009). The ITS region, glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH), RNA polymerase II second largest subunit (RPB2) and translation elongation factor -1α (TEF -1α) genes were amplified according described procedures (White et al. 1990; Berbee et al. 1999; Liu et al. 1999；Sung et al. 2007; Carbone & Kohn 1999). The sequences obtained in this study were deposited in GenBank with accession numbers: MW867245, MW867246, MW867247, MW867248, MW867249, MW867250, MW882913, MW882914, MW882915, MW882916, MW882917, MW882918, MW882919, MW882920, MW882921, MW882922, MW882923, MW882924, MW882925, MW882926, MW882927, MW882928, MW882929, MW882930. Phylogenetic analysis was conducted with combined sequences of the four loci, using the maximum likelihood method and the maximum parsimony method. In the phylogenetic tree, the six isolates and Alternaria brassicae (CBS 116528) clustered together with high bootstrap support values (MLBS=100; MPBS= 100). Based on both morphological characters and phylogenetic results, the isolates were identified as Alternaria brassicae. Pathogenicity test of isolate HEYA2 was carried out on the detached leaves in a dark thermostat incubator at 25°C. Five pots per leaf were inoculated with mycelia plugs (5 mm in diameter), another five pots were inoculated with pure agar plugs and used as the negative control. In addition, conidia suspension (105 conidia/ml) of isolate HEYD8 were sprayed on 3-month-old healthy plants grown in a greenhouse at 22 °C-28 °C. The plants sprayed with sterilized water were used as negative controls. The test was conducted three times. After 5-7 days, the leaves inoculated with other the conidia suspension or the mycelium plugs showed brown necrotic lesions that are similar to the symptoms observed in the field, but the controls remained healthy. The pathogen was reisolated and confirmed to be A. brassicae, completing Koch's postulates. To our knowledge, this is the first report of leaf spot disease caused by A. brassicae on Orychophragmus violaceus in China.