Characterizaiton and Bio Control Activity of New Trichoderma Isolates

Abstract

Trichoderma is an important genus of fungi which can be obtained from diverse habitats ranging from different soil types and decomposing organic matters. These are cosmopolitan fungi having no fixed sexual stage and are easily culturable. Besides all other beneficial application of this genus, it possesses antagonistic activities and plant growth promoting activities. They may control other pathogenic fungi such as Fusarium by various mechanisms like mycoparasitism, antibiosis, and competition for space and resources etc. These functional abilities of this genus attract research a~tivities to find out new strains and explore new tendencies of this genus. Keeping in view all these points this research experiment is focused towards isolating different strains of Trichoderma from Meerut and adjoining areas and Ambedkamagar region. For this 34 different soil samples were collected and processed, out of which 13 strains confirmed the presence of Trichoderma. These strains were further characterized morphologically, physiologically, microscopically and molecularly. The nucleotide sequences of the strains obtained was analyzed via TrichoKEY and ~CBI BLAST. These online tools con finned the strains to be T.harzianum, T.asperellum, T. virens and T. koningiopsis.