Received: 20 January 2021 Revised: 10 April 2021 Accepted: 11 April 2021 DOI: 10.1002/ndr2.12009 NEW DISEASE REPORT First report of Bipolaris sorokiniana causing spot blotch of lentil in Algeria M. El Amine Kouadri A. Amine Bekkar S. Zaim Laboratory of Research on Biological Systems and Geomatics, Department of Agronomy, Faculty of Life and Natural Sciences, University Mustapha Stambouli of Mascara, ALGERIA Correspondence M. El Amine Kouadri, Laboratory of Research on Biological Systems and Geomatics, Department of Agronomy, Faculty of Life and Natural Sciences, University of Mustapha Stambouli Mascara, Mascara, Algeria. Email: melamine.kouadri@univ-mascara.dz KEYWORDS Lens culinaris, Cochliobolus sativus Lentil (Lens culinaris) is an annual cool season plant with a high nutri- tional value (Laskar et al., 2019). It is one of the most consumed legumes after chickpea and faba bean in Algeria (National Office of Statistics, 2018). In May 2020, necrotic leaf spots were observed on 7% of the lentil plants in fields (c. 6 ha) in Relizane (northwest Algeria). Diseased leaves were surface disinfected with 2% sodium hypochlorite for three minutes, rinsed thrice with sterile distilled water, dried on sterile filter paper then placed onto potato dextrose agar (PDA) culture medium and incubated at 25 ◦ C. After five days of incubation, a fungal culture was purified using the single hyphal tip technique. The culture was velvety, dark olive in colour with fluffy white mycelium (Fig. 1). Conidiophores were brown, unbranched with septations. Conidia were dark brown in colour with septations (3 to 8 distosepta), straight or slightly curved, ovate with rounded tips (Fig. 2) and 17.5-47.5 × 10–17.5 μm in size. Morphological characteristics of the fungal isolate were similar to those described for Bipolaris sorokiniana (Sacc.) Shoemaker (teleomorph Cochliobolus sativus (Ito & Kurib.) Drechs. ex Dastur) (Manamgoda et al., 2014). To confirm the identity of the fungus, DNA was extracted from the mycelium of a single-spore culture (Bs1) grown on PDA for one week, using a NucleoSpin® Food commercial kit (Macherey Nagel, Germany). The internal transcribed spacer region was amplified using primers ITS1 and ITS4. BLAST analysis showed that the resulting sequence had 100% identity with several B. sorokiniana isolates (e.g. KJ830832, KM030311, KF512821) (Fig. 3). The ITS sequence of Bs1 was deposited in GenBank (Accession No. MW386302) This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2021 The Authors. New Disease Reports published by British Society for Plant Pathology and John Wiley & Sons FIGURE 1 Colony of Bipolaris sorokiniana on potato dextrose agar in 90 mm Petri dish after ten days incubation A pathogenicity test was conducted on lentil seedlings grown in pots in triplicate. A conidial suspension (10 5 conidia/ml) of B. New Dis Rep. 2021;43:e12009. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ndr2 1 of 3 https://doi.org/10.1002/ndr2.12009