Morphological and molecular identification and determination of host status of Cuscuta campestris Yunck. in Thrace Region of Türkiye

Field dodder (Cuscuta campestris Yunck.) is a weed species that parasitizes many cultivated plants and has been reported in 40 provinces in Türkiye. Despite being found on so many plants, cases of parasitism in the Poaceae family are limited worldwide and there is no evidence in Türkiye. In this study, weed parasitism was observed in monocot plants of the Poaceae family such as Setaria viridis, Sorghum halepense, Alopecurus myosuroides, Avena fatua, Avena sterilis, Eleusine indica, Echinochloa crus-galli, Bromus tectorum, Hordeum murinum, Elymus repens, Lolium perenne, Secale cereale and Triticum aestivum growing in Thrace Region in Northwestern part of Türkiye. According to morphological identification parameters, the parasitic weed was identified as C. campestris. C. campestris was observed to cause high damage to Echinochloa crus-galli and Sorghum halepense weed species. A molecular study was conducted to identify the weed on a molecular basis and analyze its molecular phylogeny. For this purpose, DNA was extracted, amplified with specific primers, sequenced and subjected to GenBank sequence comparison using BLAST. In BLAST, the local population showed higher similarity (99.13%) with other C. campestris accessions (KJ400050 and EU883527) and clustered in the closest class with the same species in the Maximum Likelihood tree generated using Mega 7 software.