Rice blast disease is caused by the ascomycete fungus Pyricularia oryzae and is one of the most destructive rice diseases in the world. The objectives of this study were investigating various fungal morphological characteristics and performing a phylogenetic analysis. Inter-simple sequence repeat (ISSR) and sequence-related amplified polymorphism (SRAP) markers were used to examine the genetic variation of 59 rice blast fungus strains, including 57 strains collected from different fields in Thailand and two reference strains, 70-15 and Guy11. All isolates used in this study were determined to be P. oryzae by internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequence confirmation. A total of 14 ISSR primers and 17 pairs of SRAP primers, which produced clear and polymorphic bands, were selected for assessing genetic diversity. A total of 123 polymorphic bands were generated. The similarity index value for the strains ranged from 0.25 to 0.95. The results showed that the blast fungus population in Thailand has both morphological and genetic variations. A high level of genetic variation, or genome adaptation, is one of the fungal mechanisms that could overcome host resistance to avoid host recognition. Results from this research study could bring substantial benefits and ultimately help to understand the blast fungal pathogen genome and the population structure in Thai blast fungus.regions with primers targeting open reading frames (ORFs) [5]. The molecular markers differ in cost, speed, complication, labor, degree of polymorphism, and repeatability. ISSR and SRAP marker techniques are fast and low cost, they do not require sequence information, have high repeatability, and use only one-step PCR. They provide highly discriminating information with good reproducibility and are relatively abundant, while AFLP and RAPD are more labor intensive and time consuming [4,6]. We characterized blast fungal morphology, performed DNA sequence analyses of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS), and used 20 ISSR and 30 SRAP markers to assess the genetic diversity of 59 rice blast strains, including 57 strains collected from Thai rice-growing areas and two reference strains, 70-15 and Guy11. The information obtained from this study will help to understand the population structure and evolution of rice blast fungus in Thailand.
Materials and Methods
Rice Blast MaterialsA total of 59 rice blast strains were used, including 57 strains collected from Thai rice-growing areas representing central, northern, and north-eastern parts of Thailand. Two rice blast strains, 70-15 and Guy11, were used as reference strains (Table 1). The stock of each blast strain as in filter paper was cultured and DNA was extracted using the cetyl-trimethyl-ammonium-bromide (CTAB) method described by Longya et al. [7].