Intercontinental variation of Sclerospora graminicola

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Abstract
SUMMARY: Collections of S. graminicola were made from local pearl millet crops in West Africa and India. Asexual inoculum was derived from the collections in Polythene tunnels and used to infect pearl millet cultivars from both continents. Analysis of deviance of the incidence of disease was performed on the logit scale using GLIM. The host × pathogen interactions were interpreted by use of the Finlay‐Wilkinson regression technique widely used in the study of genotype × environment interactions. While the West African collections were consistently more pathogenic than the Indian ones, West African hosts were potentially more susceptible to Indian than to West African pathogen isolates; conversely some Indian hosts were more vulnerable to West African than to Indian isolates. There was a fairly stable relationship between incidence of disease and relative pathogenicity of West African isolates but the Indian isolates were more variable in their susceptibility to changing background levels of disease. These results could influence resistance breeding strategies in pearl millet improvement programmes. The methods of analysis could be valuable for application to other complex and ill‐defined pathosystems.