Antipathy of Trichoderma against Sclerotium rolfsii Sacc.: Evaluation of Cell Wall-Degrading Enzymatic Activities and Molecular Diversity Analysis of Antagonists

The fungus Trichoderma is a teleomorph of the Hypocrea genus and associated with biological control of plant diseases. The microscopic, biochemical, and molecular characterization of Trichoderma was carried out and evaluated for in vitro antagonistic activity against the fungal pathogen Sclerotium rolfsii causing stem rot disease in groundnut. In total, 11 isolates of Trichoderma were examined for antagonism at 6 and 12 days after inoculation (DAI). Out of 11, T. virens NBAII Tvs12 evidenced the highest (87.91%) growth inhibition of the test pathogen followed by T. koningii MTCC 796 (67.03%), T. viride NBAII Tv23 (63.74%), and T. harzianum NBAII Th1 (60.44%). Strong mycoparasitism was observed in the best antagonist Tvs12 strain during 6-12 DAI. The specific activity of cell wall-degrading enzymes - chitinase and β-1,3-glucanase - was positively correlated with growth inhibition of the test pathogen. In total, 18 simple sequence repeat (SSR) polymorphisms were reported to amplify 202 alleles across 11 Trichoderma isolates. The average polymorphism information content for SSR markers was found to be 0.80. The best antagonist Tvs 12 was identified with 7 unique SSR alleles amplified by 5 SSR markers. Clustering patterns of 11 Trichoderma strains showed the best antagonist T. virens NBAII Tvs 12 outgrouped with a minimum 3% similarity from the rest of Trichoderma.