Macrophomina phaseolina can cause disease to most of the commercially grown jute (Corchorus spp.) species. This fungus is one of the major growth limiting factors of two of the most widely cultivated species-Corchorus olitorius and C. capsularis. Resistance to this fungus is present in a wild type species C. trilocularis. In this study, the differential display approach was applied to identify the genes that are expressed differentially upon fungal infection between the resistant species C. trilocularis and susceptible counterpart C. olitorius var. O-72. Differential display identified three transcripts showing different banding patterns. Cloning and sequencing revealed that one of the transcripts has homology with disease resistance gene of other plants, one with non-LTR retrotransposon and the third one has no significant homology with any reported sequence in the nucleotide database. Semi-quantitative reverse transcription PCR was performed to study expression profile under different stress conditions.
