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Horsegram is known to be susceptible to the infection of wide range of Colletotrichum species (Sharma, 1976., Murthy, 1997 and Brink and Belay, 2006). It also acts as an alternate host to the Colletotrichum isolates that attack soybean, bean and urdbean genotypes as their isolates were found infecting horsegram. Earlier, several researchers reported the incidence of anthracnose infection to an extent of 68 per cent in horsegram (Rangaswami et al.1991). Saharan (1979) reported that the disease is responsible for reduced seed germination and crop stand upto 65 per cent in Himachal Pradesh, India. The causal organism responsible for anthracnose disease was coined differently by various workers all over the world as Glomerella lindemuthianum (Butler, 1918), Colletotrichum dematium (Neergaard, 1977), C. truncatum (Holliday, 1995) and C. lindemuthianum (Brink and Belay, 2006) etc. In India, C. lindemuthianum (Sharma, 1976), C. capsici (Pangtey and Sinha, 1980), C. dematium f.sp. truncatum (Bharadwaj and Singh, 1986), C. dematium (Murthy,1997) etc. were identified as pathogens responsible for anthracnose disease by different workers. Udayasankar et al. (2012) studied seed-borne nature of C. dematium using component plating technique described by Maden et al.( 1975) and noticed C. dematium infection in all parts of the horsegram seed, i.e., seed coat, endosperm (cotyledons) and embryo with varied levels of intensity. Seed coat infection was the highest, ranged from 62-100%, followed by cotyledonary infection (36-72%) and embryo infection (30%). Chahota et al. (2005) evaluated 63 landraces of horsegram collected from different parts of Himachal Pradesh against 12 morpho-agronomical characters. Disease reaction against C. truncatum under field conditions revealed that the lines, viz., HPKC-39, HPKC-57 and HPKC-33 were found free from the disease and thus considered as potential.
Keywords: Horsegram, French bean, Agar plates, Mycoflora.