Something in the agar does not compute: On the discriminatory power of mycelial compatibility in Sclerotinia sclerotiorum
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Agricultural Science, Genetics, Mycology, Population Biology
- Keywords
- vegetative compatibility, microsatellite genotyping
- Copyright
- © 2018 Kamvar et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Something in the agar does not compute: On the discriminatory power of mycelial compatibility in Sclerotinia sclerotiorum. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26670v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26670v1
Abstract
Mycelial compatibility, the ability for fungal isolates to grow together and form one single colony, was defined for Sclerotinia sclerotiorum nearly 30 years ago and has since been used as a marker to describe clonal variation in population genetic studies. While evidence suggests an associative relationship between mycelial compatibility and vegetative compatibility, contemporary research has treated these traits as analogous. As molecular markers have been developed to describe genetic variation, researchers combined these with the mycelial compatibility groups to assess to define clonal lineages. However, several inconsistent relationships between mycelial compatibility groups, haplotypes, and even vegetative compatibility groups have been observed throughout the literature, suggesting that mycelial compatibility may not accurately reflect self-recognition. We argue that the Sclerotinia community needs to move beyond using MCG data in population genetic studies.
Author Comment
This article was submitted to Tropical Plant Pathology.