Studies on seed mycoflora of soybean and its effect on seed and seedling quality characters

Soybean is a promising pulse crop with higher percentage of protein (40–42%) and oil (20–24%). Eight fungal species were found to be associated with ten varieties of soybean seeds was studied in agar plate and blotter methods. Agar plate method was found better in yielding maximum number of colonies of fungi than blotter method. In both the methods, unsterilized seeds yielded more number of colonies than sterilized seeds. Among the eight fungi tested, Fusarium sp., reduced the percentage of germination of seeds, shoot and root length by 62%, 8.85 cm, 2.9 cm respectively, followed by Rhizoctonia sp. (58%, 10.25 cm, 3.2 cm) and Alternaria sp. (53.4%, 11 cm, 3.75 cm).