Isolation and Characterization of Post-harvest fungi from wheat (Triticum aestivum, L.) collected from Bale and West Arsi zones of Oromia, Ethiopia.

Abstract

Wheat is an important industrial and food grain, which is ranked second among the most impo rtant cereal crops in the world. In Ethiopia, wheat is one of the most important market oriente d commodity and a major source of income. Due to Lack of post-harvest technologies, an aver age 15-20% loss is recorded. So this research is aimed to isolate and identify Post-harvest fungi associated with Wheat grain collected from Bale and West Arsi zones of Oromia, Ethiopi a. A total of 144 Wheat grain samples were collected from January- April in 2017/2018 by cot a, random and incremental sampling method from four districts. Fungi isolation was done on Potato Dextrose Agar amended with 0.01% chloramphenicol. Fungal colonies were purified b y sub cultured on PDA. Morphological and microscopic characterization of the isolates was done based on fungal identification manual (Wang et al 2016). The data were recorded and analyzed by using SPSS version 20 statistical software. From 2160 wheat grains, 786 fungal isolates were recorded with 36.39%. Among the fungi isolated from current wheat samples, th e genus Fusarium was the most prevalent (86.39%) followed by Aspergillus (7.25%), Penicilli um (5.21%) and Muchor and Rhizopus (1.14%). Grains collected from open market shw highi nfection(41.33%) followed by residents’ house (36.48%) and warehouse (30.51%). Bale Zone showed relatively higher mean percent of fungal prevalence (37.78%) followed by west Arsi Z one (35.36%). Among the districts, Hassasa Keble showed highest mean percent of fungal pre valence (48.69%) followed by Agarfa (37.77%), Dodola (37.22%) and ArsiNegelle (20.18%). Generally, the of the fungi of each genus was highly variable across the sampling areas. From the study, awareness creation, cumulative integrated management, monitoring, and precaution ary measures are recommended.