Isolation and identification of the pathogen causing stem blight of Ficus hirta
Ficus hirta(vahl)is a valuable medicinal plant as well as edible plants in southern China.In 2022,a new stem blight disease was observed to infect Ficus hirta(vahl)in Danzhou of Hainan province.The inci-dence of disease reached 47.5%in fields.In order to clarify the pathogen of Ficus hirta stem blight disease,ten isolates with the same morphology were isolated from blight tissue by using a conventional tissue separation method.MA2,a representative strain with excellent growth,was selected for pathogenicity test on Ficus hirta plants,observation of morphological characteristics,sequence analysis on ITS,TUB and TEF,and phylogenetic tree construction.The results showed that morphological characteristics of the isolate MA2 was similar to that of Lasiodiplodia pseudotheobromae.The isolate MA2 was clustered into one clade in phylogenetic tree with L.pseudotheobromae.The above results indicated that the stem blight of F.hirta was caused by L.pseudotheobro-mae.This is the first report of a stem blight disease on F.hirta in China was identified as L.pseudotheobromae.