Abstract
New seedling rot disease was first discovered in Fukushima and Okayama Prefectures in May, 1974 and 1975. The disease occurred on young seedlings grown in nursery box devised for rice transplanter. From these diseased seedlings, several bacterial isolates were obtained among which 7 isolates were found to be most pathogenic. After testing their bacteriological characteristics including physiology, morphology and serology, all 7 isolates were identified as Pseudomonas glumae (Kurita et Tabei) Tominaga. Pseudomonas glumae which is known as the pathogen of bacterial grain rot of rice, sometimes causes browning on rice seedlings. No report has ever described, however, that it causes severe seedling rot symptom on young rice seedlings. It was proposed to call this disease “Bacterial seedling rot of rice.”
