ITS IDENTIFICATION OF THE MYCOPARASITIC FUNGUS CLONOSTACHYS ROSEA ISOLATED FROM MISIONES SOIL SAMPLES

PEDROZO, TT; BICH, GA; CASTRILLO, ML; VILLALBA, LL; ZAPATA, PD

Modalidad virtual

Congreso; 1st Latin American Congress of Women in Bioinformatics and Data Science 2020; 2020

Biological control is a promising and sustainable strategy to reduce damage caused by agricultural pests and the use of chemical fungicides. Fungal strains of the genus Clonostachys are studied as biocontrol agent of fungi and nematodes. However, the presence of this fungus in the soils of Misiones remains unexplored. Traditional fungal identification is generally carried out by morphological characterization in Petri dishes, and by observing their reproductive structures under the microscope. In general, with this methodology it is possible to identify to the genus level, however determining up to the species level is usually very complicated in some genera and many times ambiguities are achieved. In this context, molecular data emerges as an important tool to complement morphological information and thus achieve a correct fungal identification. The objective of this work was to molecularly identify with ITS markers a strain of the mycoparasitic fungus Clonostachys HEP30. The fungal isolate obtained was plated with the agar-potato dextrose (PDA) culture medium and incubated at 28 °C. Then the nucleic acids were isolated for molecular corroboration. From the extracted genetic material, the ITS1-5,8S-ITS2 region was amplified and sequenced. Once the region of interest was obtained, the information obtained was compared with that existing in the databases, using the Blast (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) of the NCBI (National Center For Biotechnology Information) and the fungalbarcoding database. After nucleic acid isolation, amplification and sequencing of the ITS1-5,8S-ITS2 region, and contrasting of the sequences with the biological databases, it was verified by molecular methods that the isolate corresponded with high percentage of identity (>99%) to Clonostachys rosea sequences in the NCBI database, and 100% similarity to C. rosea sequences in the fungalbarcoding curated database. The ITS molecular identification of the strain HEP30 allow us to identify this strain as C. rosea.