Seed Borne Infection And Management Of Alternaria Species In Wheat Cultivars

The research was carried on “Incidence of the seed borne infection and management of Alternaria species in wheat cultivars” at Laboratory of Bright Mid-West Agriculture and Forestry Campus, Birendranagar, Surkhet, Nepal from December 2019 to March 2020. The experiment was laid out in Completely Randomize Design (CRD). In the present investigation, seed samples of seven different varieties of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) seeds viz. Gautam, Virkuti, Aaaditya, Wk1204, NL1172, NL1177 and NL297 were collected from National Wheat Research Program (NWRP) Bhairahawa, Rupandehi, Nepal and Nepal Agriculture Research Council (NARC), Botany division, Khumaltar, Lalitpur, Nepal. Seed samples were categorized by different varieties and treatment in different day’s interval. Seed treatment with, Dhanuka M-45, Acmes tin, Trichoderma viridae and control (without treatment) was done to see their effect on seed borne infection of Alternaria in wheat. The recorded parameters among the sampled plants were germination percentage, disease incidence percentage and incidence of Alternaria on the seeds. The variety ‘Aditya’ germinated maximum (97.00%) and variety NL-297 germinated minimum (0.25%) without treatments. However, Variety ‘Virkuti’ germinated maximum (95.5%) after treatment. Whereas, Variety NL-297 showed no seed-borne infection (0.00%) and variety ‘NL-1177’ showed the maximum disease severity (12.75% at 5DAI, 24.75% at 7DAI and 32.25% at 9DAI respectively) without treatment. Similarly, in treated seeds variety NL-1177 showed the maximum disease incidence percentage (6.75%) at 5DAI, variety Gautam (9.37%) at 7DAI and variety NL-1177 (9.87%) at 9DAI. whereas variety Gautam showed the minimum disease incidence (3.50%) after 9DAI, Variety ‘Virkuti’ (6.62%) at 7DAI and Variety ‘Gautam’ (8.0%) at 9DAI respectively. With the treatment variety Gautam could reduce the disease incidence by 60% at 5DAT, 50.02% at 7DAT and 68.93% at 9DAT.Similarly, variety Virkuti reduce in disease incidence by 13.53% at 5DAT, 15.12% at 7DAT and 10.41% at 9DAT. The Variety NL-1177 reduced disease incidence by 47.05% at 5DAT, 70.22% at 7DAT and 69.39% at 9DAT respectively. The results also showed that the control measure of Trichoderma viridae found significant performance (99.84%) in controlling seed borne pathogens and increasing germination of wheat seeds and the Variety Aditya was found as best in germination (97%) with lower seed borne Alternaria and the variety NL-297 was found non-disease severity (0.00%).