Viswanathan, A.; Sivaramakrishnan, S. ; Thakur, R.P. ; Hess, D. ; Magill, C.W. ; Sankaralingam, A.
DNA samples were isolated from fungal spores collected from leaves of pearl millet infected with downy mildew in India, Niger, Nigeria, Mali and Burkina Faso. Nested polymerase chain reaction was used to amplify the internal transcribed spacer region 2 (ITS-2) of the ribosomal RNA encoding genes. The first primers (ITS1 and ITS6) were in the conserved regions of the large and small subunit rRNA; the second pair (ITS 3 and ITS 4) flanked just the ITS-2 segment.
Downy mildew (DM; caused by S. graminicola) incidence was evaluated during the rainy seasons of 2001-04 in 585 pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) fields in 16 districts of Rajasthan, India. The virulence of 12 S. graminicola isolates from 4 districts of western Rajasthan (Barmer, Bikaner, Churu and Jodhpur) and 3 controls (Sg 139, Sg 212 and Sg 409 from Jodhpur, Durgapura and Patancheru) on 7 pearl millet lines (IP 18292, IP 18293, P 7-4, P 310-17, 700651, 852B and ICMP 451) was also evaluated under greenhouse conditions.