CHARACTERIZATION OF cox3 AND rnl GENES ENCODED IN MITOCHONDRIA OF Fusarium graminearum Schwabe

In this study, the phylogenetic relationship among Fusarium graminearum Schwabe isolates was established for the first time based on mitochondrial cox3 and rnl gene variations. The genes were amplified from 45 isolates purified from Türkiye and Iran together with 2 Korean strains by polymerase chain reaction. The amplicons were sequenced and nucleotide polymorphisms were detected by alignment. The phylogenetic relationship was constructed by using PAUP 4.0a with the maximum parsimony method. Fragments with 477 bp length, belonging to cox3, were obtained from 46 samples; 1547 bp-amplicons of rnl were produced from 45 samples. Sequence similarities were calculated as 30-100 % and 17-94 % for cox3 and rnl, respectively. Nucleotide variations within the rnl was found higher than within cox3. It was shown that SNPs and in-dels, found in coding regions, cause a codon change and may alter more than one codon by causing frame shift without affect gene functions. Bootstrap values belonging to cox3 and rnl dataset was found ranging from 57 to 84 %, and 54 to 100 %, respectively. Parsimony analysis revealed that Korean isolates were in monophyletic relationship with Turkish and Iranian isolates. It is proposed that the methodology can be applied to other fungal species because the phylogenetic relationships at the intraspecific level are able to establish among Fusarium species based on mitochondrial gene variation.