Abstract
Phytophthora cinnamomi is the causal agent of root rot, canker and dieback of thousands of plant species around the globe. This oomycete not only causes severe economic losses but also threatens natural ecosystems. In South Africa, P. cinnamomi affects eucalyptus, avocado, macadamia and indigenous fynbos. Despite being one of the most important plant pathogens with a global distribution, little information is available regarding origin, invasion history and population biology. This is partly due to the limited number of molecular markers available for studying P. cinnamomi. Using available genome sequences for three isolates of P. cinnamomi, sixteen polymorphic microsatellite markers were developed as a set of multiplexable markers for both PCR and Gene Scan assays. The application of these markers on P. cinnamomi populations from avocado production areas in South Africa revealed that they were all polymorphic in these populations. The markers developed in this study represent a valuable resource for studying the population biology and movement of P. cinnamomi and will aid in the understanding of the origin and invasion history of this important species.
Highlights
Phytophthora cinnamomi (Rands), causal agent of Phytophthora root rot, affects close to 5000 plant species across the globe[1,2,3] including important native species in Australia and South Africa and perennial trees such as avocado, macadamia, peach, oak and chestnut[4]
Further filtering by manual curation of the repeats to remove imperfect and compound repeats resulted in 122 regions that could be considered for marker development
After conducting a local BLAST analysis of the 122 candidate SSR regions against the genome of P. cinnamomi to further remove SSR regions of high complexity, 40 SSR regions were selected for primer design, 23 of these resulted in primers that met the required criteria: product size equal or less than 500 bp and primers with properties that are compatible for multiplex PCRs in downstream applications
Summary
Phytophthora cinnamomi (Rands), causal agent of Phytophthora root rot, affects close to 5000 plant species across the globe[1,2,3] including important native species in Australia and South Africa and perennial trees such as avocado, macadamia, peach, oak and chestnut[4]. This destructive pathogen has caused several global epidemics, including root rot of chestnut in America and jarrah dieback in Australia. Phytophthora cinnamomi is a heterothallic species which requires the presence of both A1 and A2 mating types to undergo sexual reproduction. Both mating types of the pathogen have been reported to be present in natural ecosystems such as in Australia and South Africa[11,12,13]. Asexual reproduction takes place through the formation of large numbers of sporangia, that release motile zoospores[4,15] This is believed to be the predominant mode of reproduction and spread of the pathogen in natural populations. The A1 and A2 mating types can often be distinguished based on the genetic differentiation[19,22]
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