Determination of Didymella rabiei as quantitatively in infected chickpea plants

The chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.), an edible plant that has an important place among our main food sources, is also a very rich protein. For this reason, it has a large share of planting area in terms of production. However, both economical and phytopathological problems have restricted the cultivation of chickpeas and caused great decreases in productivity. Ascochyta Blight caused by Didymella rabiei (Kovachevski) von Arx [anamorph: Ascochyta rabiei (Passerini) Labrousse] is one of the most important plant diseases affecting the continuity and productivity of chickpea production negatively. It is known that the pathogenic potential of D. rabiei is quite variable. From this perspective; to design appropriate strategies for controlling the effect and to train resistant varieties; understanding of disease mechanism, design of appropriate breeding strategies and biologic and genetic characterization of pathogen should be known. Through quantitative real-time polymerase chain reactions (qRT-PCR), D. rabiei pathogens can be detected directly from among different fungal species. In this study, pathogenic fungi obtained from infected plants collected from surveillance in 2013 and 2014 were used. The isolates obtained from these examples are available in stocks of Department of Biology of Gaziantep University. As a result of the pathogenicity tests performed, infectious plant materials and disease severity data of D. rabiei were obtained. By designing the specific primer-probe combinations for D. rabiei fungus causing infections in all over - ground parts of the chickpea plant; qRT-PCR applications. cDNA synthesis was performed from the isolates present in the stocks for use in qRT-PCR applications. As a result of the study, quantitative determination of infected chickpea plants with different virulence levels under in-vitro conditions were achieved.