Effect of Temperature and Leaf Wetness Period on the Components of Resistance to Late Leaf Spot Disease in Groundnut

A complete understanding of the epidemiological factors required for optimum for disease development facilitates the design of effective and reliable screening techniques and also disease prediction models. An attempt was made to study the effects of different temperatures ($15-35^{\circ}C$) and leaf wetness periods (4-24 h) on the development of late leaf spot (LLS) in three groundnut genotypes differing in their susceptibility to LLS infection. Irrespective of the genotype, the disease progress evaluated based on different components of resistance was maximum between $15-20^{\circ}C$ and minimum between $20-25^{\circ}C$. At temperatures $\geq$$30^{\circ}C$, LLS development was insignificant. The overall severity of LLS increased with an increase in the leaf wetness period from 4 h to 12 h a day. Further increase of wetness period to 16 h resulted in a rapid increase in the severity. Thereafter, the disease severity gradually decreased with an increase in the wetness period. The effect of temperature and wetness periods on the individual component of disease quantification was not uniform compared between genotypes with different levels of susceptibility/resistance to LLS infection. The results of this study indicate that temperature and leaf wetness period are critical in late leaf spot screening programs since the expression of disease symptoms measured from disease initiation till defoliation, varied differently in the test genotypes with respect to change in these two parameters.