First worldwide report of Exserohilum rostratum causing leaf spot on strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa Duch.)

During April 2022, leaf spot was observed on strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa Duch.) with a disease incidence of approximately 45% among 100 plants. Strawberry was cultivated in a nursery at Huzhou University (30.87゜N, 120.13゜E), Zhejiang Province, China. In the strawberry greenhouse, the average temperature was 15-18 degrees, 40%-60% humidity. Early symptoms appeared as dark brown or black spotted necrotic lesions, which expanded from 2 to 6 mm in diameter. Dark brown spots with yellow halos occupied half of the leaf area and eventually developed leaf blight with large yellow halos. To isolate the causal agent, 0.5 cm x 0.5 cm fragments were cut from three symptomatic leaves, and were surface sterilized with 75% ethanol for 30 s and then rinsed three times with sterilized water. The airdried leaf fragments were placed on PDA with 50 μg/ml ampicillin and incubated in the dark at 25℃ for two days. Isolates were obtained by transferring hyphal plugs of 1 mm in diameter onto PDA. The colony morphology was circular and dark brown on the upperside and black on the underside, with cottony mycelium and an large amount of gray aerial mycelium. Conidia were large, light olive-brown to dark olive-brown and light olive-black and septate. The typical conidia were oval or rod-shaped, rarely curved, and dark septa defined the basal and apical cells. In the two typical forms of conidia, the average size of oval conidia was approximately 18.77 × 54.92 μm (11.99 to 26.97 × 35.13 to 74.59 μm, n = 20), and the average size of the rod-shaped conidia was approximately 14.80 × 103.24 μm (11.24 to 24.64 × 73.11 to 131.51 μm, n = 20). The morphological characteristics matched well with previous descriptions of Exserohilum rostratum (Sharma et al. 2014; Liu et al. 2021). The identity of C1-L and C1-S from symptomatic tissues was confirmed by means of multi-locus gene sequencing. Genomic DNA was extracted from the mycelium using the CTAB (cetyltrimethylammonium bromide) method (Griffith & Shaw 1998). Molecular identification was conducted by sequencing the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) rDNA region, partial glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) gene, partial actin (ACT) gene, and partial beta-tubulin 2 (TUB2), using the primers ITS1/ITS4 (White et al. 1990), GDF/GDR (Templeton et al. 1992), ACT512F/ACT783R (Carbone and Kohn 1999), T1 (O’Donnell and Cigelnik 1997) and Bt2b (Glass and Donaldson, 1995). The obtained sequences of C1-L and C1-S were the same. Moreover, the sequences have been deposited in GenBank under accession numbers ON982516 (ITS), ON996915 (GAPDH), ON996916 (ACT), and ON996917 (TUB2). The results of Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) analysis revealed that the ITS, GAPDH, and ACT had 100% identity with the sequences of E. rostratum (GenBank Accession No. LT837834, LT883550, and LT837672, respectively), the TUB2 had 99.61% similarity with BLAST sequences of E. rostratum (LT899391). These morphological characteristics and molecular analyses allowed the identification of the pathogen as E. rostratum. Koch’s postulates were performed with five healthy detached strawberry leaves with three inoculations per leaf of the ‘Akihime’ strawberry variety. Surface-sterilized leaves were wounded with an aseptic needle, and inoculated with 2 mm diameter mycelial plugs from 5-day-old cultures of E. rostratum. Control leaves were also wounded with the aseptic needle, and inoculated with a sterile PDA agar plug. The leaves were incubated at 25℃ in Petri plates with petioles wrapped in moist sterile cotton. The diseased symptoms included black spots on the epidermis of the wounded leaves within 5, 10, and 20 days after inoculation. Mock-inoculated controls remained asymptomatic, and three biological repetitions were conducted. The fungus reisolated from the diseased leaves was confirmed as E. rostratum by sequencing. Abundant reports have shown that E. rostratum can infect many economically important crops such as maize, rice, and pineapple (Sun et al. 2021; Kabore et al. 2022; Luo et al. 2012). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of E. rostratum on strawberry in China and worldwide.