and incubated at 27 ± 2 _C for 48 h on a rotary shaker (ZHWY-211C, Selecta, Spain) at 150 rpm. Thereafter, bacterial suspension cultures were centrifuged for 8 min at 8000 rpm, the cell density was adjusted to 108 cfu/mL using a spectrophotometer (Spectronic® 20 Genesys TM, Schutt Labortechnik) at l = 620 nm. For tomato root pathogen inoculations, an alcohol-flamed knife was inserted 5e10 cm deep into the soil of each pot to cut the roots along two sides, and the inoculation was performed by soil drenching with 30 mL of the bacterial suspension (108 cfu/mL), which was added to each pot around the base of each plant. The control plants were treated with the same volume of distilled water. All of the pots with the treated and inoculated seedlings were maintained in the previously described greenhouse conditions.
The wilt disease index was calculated four weeks after inoculation according to Winstead and Kelman (1952) and Kurabachew and Wydra (2014) using the following formula: