Evaluating resistance of inbred lines of corn to maize sheath blight and screening of resistance resources

By means of soil-inoculation in a two-year test, the resistance of 45 inbred lines of corn to maize sheath blight was identified and evaluated with relative resistance index. At the same time, the sheath blight disease was inoculated on the sixth sheath of inbred line R15 and R09 which were potted to compare the resistance. The results indicated that there were significant differences between their resistances to the sheath blight disease, the difference between the two years was also significant, but the resistance for a single inbred line was relatively stable during the two years. It also showed that the resistance of R15 was stronger than R09. Among the test 45 materials, there were no immune inbred line to be found and only CML270 was highly resistant with the ratio of 2.2%, while the moderate resistance ratio was 17.8%, the moderately susceptive ratio was 55.6%, and highly susceptive ratio was 24.4%. From them, 3 inbred lines were selected for high resistance and high susceptiveness, respectively, in order to take genetic analysis of maize sheath blight gene in next step.