Isolation And Identification Of Fusarium spp. From Agarwood And Their Pathogenicity Test On Aquilaria subintegra

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Date
2016-09
Authors
Mohammad Zubairi, Kartiekasari Syahidda
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Abstract
Agarwood is a dark resin which is mainly produced by Aquilaria plants from the family Thymelaeaceae. Agarwood is widely used in incense, medicinal and perfumery industries worldwide. Production of agarwood is actually the result of wounding and/or infection of microbes, particularly fungi. This study was conducted to isolate and identify fungi associated with agarwood formation based on morphological and molecular characteristics, as well as to evaluate the efficacy of different artificial inoculation methods in inducing agarwood formation. A total of 135 fungal isolates were obtained from agarwood samples from several different locations around Peninsular Malaysia. Based on morphological identification, 13 genera of fungi were identified whereby the most common genera were Fusarium, followed by Aspergillus, Lasiodiplodia and Colletotrichum. Depending on the fungal genera, DNA sequences of three genes namely internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region, translation elongation factor 1-alpha (tef1-α) and β-tubulin genes were applied to provide further confirmation of the fungal identities. Results of the molecular analysis have corresponded to the morphological identification. Out of all fungal genera, the most diverse fungal species were Fusarium with five species, followed by Aspergillus (4), Colletotrichum (2), Trichoderma (2) and Penicillium (2). Results of pathogenicity tests showed that all Fusarium isolates tested were pathogenic towards the A. subintegra trees but varying degrees of virulence. Fusarium solani was regarded as the main pathogen associated with agarwood formation as the disease severity (DS) and the number of highly virulent isolates recorded was the highest compared to other Fusarium species. In addition, the injection technique may be the better artificial inoculation method to induce agarwood formation compared to the bamboo stick technique. The information of the present study contributes to the knowledge on the occurrence of fungi associated with agarwood formation, as well as the knowledge to improve the agarwood production in plantation industry through artificial inoculation.
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To isolate and identify fungi associated with agarwood formation based on , morphological and molecular characteristics,
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