Akhtar Ali, The University of Tulsa

Akhtar Ali

Combatting and Exploiting dsRNA viruses

Macrophomina phaseolina (MP) is a plant pathogenic fungus that causes charcoal rot of soybean. Soybean is one of the economically important crops in the United States of America (USA), and charcoal rot severely impacts the quality and quantity of soybean yield. Traditional control methods are not effective against MP, and exploring new methods such as the use of mycoviruses could be a potential biological control measure. In this study, considerable number of MP isolates were collected and screened for the presence of mycoviruses. A total of 17 MP isolates were confirmed by dsRNA that harbored mycoviruses. dsRNA from all 17 MP isolates was sequenced using high-throughput sequencing (HTS), which revealed a range of mycoviruses. Several MP isolates were co-infected with different mycoviruses. One of the MP isolates contains six different mycoviruses that belong to various genera. To further determine the role of these viruses in the fungal host, we aim to eliminate these mycoviruses from a specific isolate to generate isogenic lines. Various curing techniques, including heat treatment, chemical curing, and single-spore isolation, were applied to create isogenic lines. As a result, five distinct fungal isogenic lineages were generated, and each lineage was carrying a different combination of mycoviruses. Pathogenicity tests on soybean seedlings were conducted with all five isogenic lineages, and the results exhibited varying levels of pathogenicity, differing from the original starting isolate. These results will be discussed in more detail and shared with the scientific community at the conference.