A survey of two root-lesion nematodes associated with commercial cut flower crops in Colombia, with notes on their morpho-molecular characters and phylogenetic relationships

During a nematode survey conducted in commercial cut flower operations in the Andean region of Bogota savannah, in Colombia, two species of root-lesion nematodes were detected in the rhizospheres of Chrysanthemum sp. and Alstroemeria sp. These populations were used for morphological and molecular analyses. Morphological and morphometric analyses showed that two samples of the populations from Chrysanthemum sp. and one from Alstroemeria sp. exhibited characters matching those of the type and reference populations of Pratylenchus bolivianus. . The morphological identification of these populations was confirmed by analysis of the D2-D3 segments of the 28S of rRNA gene sequences, which presented a 99.9% similarity with P. bolivianus reference sequences. Morphological and morphometric analyses of another population extracted from Alstroemeria sp. indicated that this population was a new representative of the genus Zygotylenchus. . Although this new species was morphologically similar to Z. guevarai, , it differed from the type and reference populations of Z. guevarai in morphometric characters and ITS rRNA gene sequences, which showed a low similarity (85%) with these reference sequences.