Plant disease phenotyping methodologies can vary considerably among testers and often suffer from shortcomings in their procedures and applications. This has been an important challenge in resistance breeding to brown rot, one of the most severe pre-and postharvest stone fruit diseases caused by Monilinia spp. Literature about methodologies for evaluating stone fruit susceptibility to brown rot is abundant but displays significant variations across the described approaches, limiting the ability to compare results from different studies. This is despite the fact that authors largely agree on the main factors influencing brown rot development, such as Monilinia inocula, environmental conditions, cultivars, fruit stage, and management practices. The present review first discusses ways to control or at least account for major factors affecting brown rot phenotyping studies. The second section describes in detail the different steps of fruit infection assays, comparing different protocols available in the literature with the objective of highlighting best practices and further improvement of phenotyping for brown rot susceptibility. Finally, experimental results from multi-year evaluation trials are also reported, highlighting year-to-year variability and exploring correlations of evaluation outcomes among years and assay types, suggesting that choice of phenotyping methodology must be carefully considered in breeding programs.

Fusarium wilt (Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. ciceris (Padwick) Matuo and K. Sato) is one of the major yield limiting factors of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.). For eco-friendly and sustainable management of the disease, Trichoderma harzianum as commercial product (Biocont-T), used as seed coat and jointly amended in peat moss were evaluated against the pathogen. The study was carried out in the fields of Girdarasha research station (8.8 Km south of Erbil), College of Agriculture, Salahaddin University. A moderate Ascochyta-resistant chickpea cultivar (Flip 6-15) was used. The results showed that seed treatments with T. harzianum and peat moss amendments were significantly reduced the disease incidence and severity. An increase of growth rate, plant height, biological and seed yield was also occurred. Three quantities (500, 1000, 1500 g) of peat moss showed enhancements in terms of disease incidence and severity reduction and increased the growth rate and other plant agronomic parameters as compared to untreated control. Treatment efficiency towards the yield and percentage of disease inhibition (PDI%) between treatments were measured. Using 10 Bcnt, 1000 Ptms-Tri and 1500 Ptms treatments were the most efficient treatments to enhance yield. For PDI %, 1000 Ptms-Tri, 10 Bcnt1500 Ptms and 500Ptms-Tri, were showed high disease inhibition in the field.

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