First Report of Pseudoidium santalacearum Causing Foliar Powdery Mildew on Santalum album in Guangdong Province, China.

Abstract

Santalum album Linn is an evergreen and facultative root hemiparasitic tree. It is attached to host roots through haustorium to withdraw water and nutrients. Its aromatic heartwood, honored as "Green Gold", is widely used in perfumes, incense, medicine, and skin cancer prevention (Sandeep and Manohara 2019, Polaiah et al. 2020). From February to June 2022, powdery mildew was observed on over 80% of S. album in the nursery with a mean temperature and relative humidity of 30/22°C (day/night) and 55/82% (day/night) at the Research Institute of Tropical Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Guangdong, China (23°11'N, 113°23'E). Initial symptoms were circular to irregular white colonies on the leaf surface (Fig. 1). As the disease progressed, white mycelia covered the entire leaf surface and premature defoliation of the infected leaf was observed. Then a bare stem remained and subsequently desiccated (Sundararaj et al. 2022). Infected leaves with mycelia were collected and observed under a Zeiss AX10 microscope. Foot cells of conidiophores (n = 30) were straight to slightly curved cylindrical, and the length and width of foot cells were up to 24.8 to 44.6 × 8.2 to 11.7 μm. Conidiophores (n = 30) were straight, 83.5 to 127.3 μm long × 6.6 to 7.6 μm wide and produced three immature conidia in chains. Conidia (n = 30) were elliptical to cylindrical, measured 31.3 to 41.2 μm × 11.3 to 13.7 μm. The sexual stage was not found. The morphological characterization of our samples was consistent with powdery mildew of S. album in India, termed Pseudoidium santalacearum (Patel et al. 2015). However, the molecular identification was not performed. In this study, we carefully collected the mildew and extracted the genomic DNA. The internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of rDNA was amplified using universal primers ITS1 and ITS4 (White et al. 1990). The ITS sequences of the three samples (GenBank Accession No. OQ746371, OQ746372, and OQ746373) were all more than 99% identical with the sequence of Erysiphe palczewskii on Caragana arborescens (GenBank Accession No. LC010048) (Takamatsu et al. 2015). It is known that Erysiphe containing chasmothecia belongs to teleomorph, whereas Pseudoidium is an asexual morph of Erysiphe, belonging to anamorph (Hsiao et al. 2022, Meeboon and Takamatsu 2016). In our samples, there was no chasmothecia, and the morphological characterization was consistent with P. santalacearum (Patel et al. 2015). Therefore, we classified it as P. santalacearum. Phylogenetic analysis showed that P. santalacearum had a closer relationship with the E. palczewskii (Fig. 2). Pathogenicity tests were conducted by gently pressing the infected leaves onto five healthy S. album plants. Five non-inoculated plants were used as controls. The plants were placed in a growth chamber (Light/Dark: 16 h/8 h, temperature: 25 ± 2°C). Inoculated leaves developed powdery mildew symptoms after 7-12 days, whereas the control plants remained symptomless (Fig. 1). Morphological and molecular characters of the fungus on the inoculated plants were identical to those on naturally infected S. album, fulfilling Koch's postulates. To our knowledge, this is the first report of P. santalacearum on S. album in Guangdong, China. Powdery mildew can generally result in a high mortality of S. album seedlings. Therefore, identification of the pathogen provides a scientific basis for effective diagnosis and prevention of the disease and contribute to an appropriate nursery management of S. album seedlings.