Abstract
Charcoal rot caused are the most dangerous soil-borne dis- eases that infect strawberry in Egypt. These pathogens have mycotoxic activities; this encouraged us to study the effect of these activities on some botanical traits and at molecular level using the start codon targeted (SCoT) markers tech- nique. Where infection with pathogens led to highly decrease in yield, all vegetative growth characteristics were affected in all cultivars. The infection had a positive effect on the disease incidence and severity in all cultivars. Five SCoT primers proved to be valid in showing molecular alterations between infected and uninfected plants, which may be due to the structural rearrangements in DNA by mutagenic activ- ity for mycotoxins. Cluster analysis showed molecular and phenotypic variation among infected plants and uninfected plants. Fungal infections induced molecular alterations with an average of 41.3% polymorphism. The results give an indi- cation of the presence of mutagenic effects for Charcoal rot on strawberry cultivars under study