Molecular analysis of helicotylenchus cf. Dlgonlcus from south of iran based on sequence of the 28s ribosomal dna

Helicotylenchus is a cosmopolitan genus including some important plant parasitic nematodes causing damage in agricultural and horticultural crops. During a soil sampling of almond (Prunus) orchards in Baft region of Kerman province (South East of Iran), a species of Helicotylenchus was extracted from rizosphere of almonds and identified according to morphological and morphometric characters as H. digonicus. In addition, the D2D3 segment of 28s rDNA was amplified using specific primers and sequenced. The Nblast result showed that studied population has 8 nucleotides differences with Italian population of H. digonicus (DQ328758; 99% identity). Phylogenetic analysis using Maximum Likelihood places this population close to an undescribed population of Helicotylenchus (HM014303) and H. digonicus. Genetic pairwise distances showed low variation (0.002) with a population of H. digonicus (HM014241) from South Africa.