Preliminary genome analysis of Pyricularia grisea (Cooke) Sacc. by automated fluorescent AFLP

Blast is one of the most important rice diseases and is distributed worldwide: it is caused by the Ascomycete Pyricularia grisea (Cooke) Sacc. (teleomorph: Magnaporthe grisea (Hebert) Yaegashi & Udagawa). Symptoms are necrotic lesions, where the pathogen can be isolated, on leaves, necks and panicles. In Italy, the most important European rice growing country, blast can causes important economic losses. Fluorescent Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism (fAFLP) analysis was utilized for the first time on a collection of Italian isolates of this fungus to investigate its intraspecific variability. Infected rice plants of different Italian cultivar were collected, during four years, in a field in Northern Italy: seventy-eight strains of P. grisea were isolated from lesions on leaves, neck, panicle and seed. A monoconidial culture was obtained for each strains. The dendrograms, obtained by analysing and combining the two fAFLP pattern by using Dice similarity coefficient (SD) and clustering of fingerprints performed with the unweighted pair groups (UPGMA), does not show any apparent correlation with specifity of the fungus toward a part of the plant or a rice cultivar but emphasize the need to deepen this analysis with other pairs of primers.