Thielaviopsis basicolais a soil-borne plant pathogen which causes root rot disease in tobacco plants. Detection and monitoring of T. basicolain soil is of great significance to control this disease. Based on the differences in internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequences of T. basicola and other fungal pathogens,a specific primer pair Tb1/Tb2 for T. basicolawas developed. The results showed that the primer pair gave a single amplicon of 330 bp from T. basicola and revealed no undesirable cross-reaction with other seven soil-borne pathogen isolates and three tobacco rhizosphere dominant fungi isolates. With a series of 10-fold genomic DNA dilutions of T. basicola,the detection limit of 1 pg/μL in conventional PCRand100 fg/μL in real-time quantitative PCR was achieved. With DNA from the soil inoculated with different numbers of T. basicola conidia,the detection limit was 10 conidia per reaction in conventional PCR and 0.4 conidia per reaction in real-time quantitative PCR.
