Abstract
Recently, a disease similar to southern blight has occurred frequently on seedling stock of loquat in Nagasaki Prefecture. One kind of fungus similar to Sclerotium rolfsii Saccardo, the causal fungus of southern blight, was isolated consistently from collar rot lesions of loquat seedling stocks. The isolates were identical to S. rolfsii in all examined characters, such as mycelial growth, colony color, sclerotia formation and pathogenicity against various plants. From these results the isolated fungus was identified to be Sclerotium rolfsii Saccardo. The S. rolfsii isolates from loquat could be grouped into two types according to the size of sclerotia formed on Czapek Agar medium.
