Identification of Colletotrichumspecies responsible for anthracnose of strawberry based on the internal transcribed spacers of the ribosomal region.

In recent years, different molecular techniques have led to an important progress in the characterisation of Colletotrichumspecies, but there are no available methods which permit the easy identification of Colletotrichumstrains and their assignation to classical species. In the present work, the restriction patterns generated from the region spanning the internal transcribed spacers (ITS1 and ITS2) and the 5.8S rRNA gene, were used to identify a total of 80 strains of Colletotrichum, the majority of them isolated from strawberry. One of the most interesting results derived from this study was the easy and reliable distinction, using the endonuclease MvnI, between Colletotrichum fragariaeand Colletotrichum gloeosporoides, both responsible of anthracnose on strawberry and phenotypically indistinguishable. Moreover, we propose the restriction fragments generated by the endonucleases MvnI, PvuII and ScrFI as a rapid method to differentiate species of the Colletotrichumgenus.