Preliminary results on secondary metabolites by a hypovirulent strain of Cryphonectria parasitica

Cryphonectria parasitica (Murr.) Barr., the causal agent of chestnut blight, still causes in Europe serious damages on Castanea sativa L. (Heiniger and Rigling, 1994). Transmissible hypovirulence, due to cytoplasmic, high molecular weight RNAs (Grente and Sauret, 1969; Van Alfen et al., 1975), provides an efficient biocontrol of the disease and has been successfully used particularly in forest (Bisiach et al., 1991). C. parasitica hypovirulent strains differ from the virulent ones for both their morphological characteristics (Grente, 1965) and their primary metabolism (Wang and Nuss, 1995; Gao et al., 1996). Secondary metabolites have been partially characterized only for the virulent strains (Gaumann and Naef-Roth, 1957). the aim of this work was to investigate the secondary metabolism of a hypovirulent strain of C. parasitica and to evaluate the effect of some isolated compounds on both tomato seedlings and calli of C. sativa.