Indian Journal of Agricultural Biochemistry

Biocontrol agent Trichoderma has attained importance for substitute of chemical pesticides and hence an attempt was intended to corroborate the positive relatedness of molecular and morphological characters. A fungal strain of Trichoderma atroviride TAU8 was isolated from the sample collected from rhizosphere soil of Azeetmal, Auraiya district of Uttar Pradesh, India. The universal primers were used for amplification of the 18S rRNA gene fragment and strain was characterized by using 18S rRNA gene sequence with the help of ITS marker. It is proposed that the identified strain Trichoderma atroviride TAU8 be assigned as the type strain of a species of the genus Trichoderma based on phylogenetic tree analysis together with the 18S rRNA gene sequence search in Ribosomal Database Project, small subunit rRNA and large subunit rRNA databases. The sequence was deposited in GenBank with the accession number KC008065. Thus an integrated approach of morphological and molecular markers can be employed to identify a superior strain of Trichoderma for its commercial exploitation.