Morphological and molecular characterisation of Heterodera filipjevi (Madzhidov, 1981) from the Slovak Republic

Abstract

Cysts, males and juveniles from a population of Heterodera filipjevi found on sports-ground turf in Trnava, Slovak Republic, in 2016 are described based on morphology and morphometrics. The identity of species of juveniles extracted from cysts was subsequently determined and confirmed by PCR-RFLP and sequencing. Morphologically, cysts, juveniles and males from the Slovak Republic are similar to paratypes from Tajikistan. The results of the phylogenetic analysis of the ITS rRNA gene sequences confirmed the species identification and phylogenetic relationship of H. filipjevi with other Heterodera species. Of interest, this analysis showed the close similarity between the Slovakian (KY349106) and Chinese (KU896216) samples, which differed by a single nucleotide and clustered together. To our knowledge, this is also the first report of H. filipjevi from the Slovak Republic, thus increasing the total number of cyst nematode species of the Heterodera genus known to occur in the country to a total of 15 species.