CHARACTERIZATION of cox3 and rnl GENES ENCODED IN MITOCHONDRIA of Fusarium graminearum

Abstract

In this study, the phylogenetic relationship among Fusarium graminearum isolates was established for the first time based on mitochondrial cox3 and rnl genes’ variations. The cox3 and rnl were amplified from 45 isolates purified from Turkey and Iran together with 2 Korean strains by polymerase chain reaction. The amplicons were sequenced and nucleotide polymorphisms were detected by alignment. The phylogenetic relationship was constructed by using PAUP 4.0a with the maximum parsimony method. Fragments with 477 bp length, belonging to cox3, were obtained from 46 isolates; 1547 bp-amplicons of rnl were produced from 45 isolates. Sequence similarities were calculated as 30-100 % and 17-94 % for cox3 and rnl, respectively. Nucleotide variations within the rnl was found higher than within cox3. It has been shown that SNPs and in-dels, found in coding regions, cause a codon change and may alter more than one codon by causing frame shift without affect gene’ functions. Bootstrap values belonging to cox3 and rnl dataset was found ranging from 57 to 84 %, and 54 to 100 %, respectively. Parsimony analysis revealed that Korean isolates were in monophyletic relationship with Turkish and Iranian isolates. The applicability of the methodology to other phytopathogenic fungi has also been demonstrated in this study.