Abstract
Artificial inoculation of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) germ plasm lines with Ascoehyta rabiei (Pass) Lab. is a usual procedure for screening of the sources of resistance against gram blight disease. Among the culture meid.a, the chickpea seed meal agar (CSMA) medium is the best for growing and cultur-ing the colonies of A. rabiei (Kaiser, 1973), but it usually took 30-40 days to cover the surface of the medium in a 90mm diameter petridish. This slow growth of the fungus and the use of a large number of petridishes for mass culturing was not only discouraging (time consuming) but also costly. Earlier and pioneer pathogists on chickpea blight desired. the development of a quick methodology for mass culturing of A. rabiei (attar and Hafiz, 1952). As a positive response to this desire, Khan (1980) developed a mass culturing tech-nique, involving the use of auto slaved chickpea seeds in a glass flask and their inoculation with the culture of A. rabiei. This technique, though proved to be a quick methodology for culturing of the fungus but the use of costly glass-ware (500.100D ml flask) was still a limiting factor for mass culturing. Therefore, a technique was developed which replaced the use of costly glass-ware by peIythe.- ne bags and it proved an extremely low cost easy-go method for mass culturing. The materials used in this technique were 124' x 8' size polythene bag, a half inch plastic ring cut from an inch diaraeter plastic pipe, a cotton plug and 300 g of chick pea seeds. The chickpea seeds were soaked in tape water for about six hours and then they were boiled for about SO minutes. The boiled seeds were spread on paper towels to absorb free moisture and were surface dried. The seeds were then put into the polythene bag and the open end of the bag was passed through the half inch plastic ring. A cotton plug was inserted into the mouth of the bag passing through the ring. The bag, with seeds inside, was autoclaved at 15 p. s. 1, for 20 minutes. The seeds were inoculated with A. rabiei by inserting three to four 6 mm agar plugs, containing A. rabiei inyce-
*Department of Plant Pathology, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad.
