Abstract
Cotton seedlings are highly susceptible to damping off (Fusarium spp.) at the beginning of the development of lateral roots.
Cotton seedlings affected at this stage, 8 to 15 days old (H-K in Fig. 1) are hardly able to recover and killed easily.
At these critical stages, especially 10 to 12 days old (I and J in Fig. 1) cotton seedlings show little or no carbon assimilation, maximum respiration rate, minimum transpiration rate, and exhaustion of stored-up food.
The infection by damping off fungi often causes over-increase of respiration and over-decrease of transpiration in cotton seedlings.
