Wet sieving
and dilution technique as suggested by Sheikh &
Ghaffar (1975) was used. Twenty gram soil sample was
wet sieved through 100 mesh (150 um) placed on 300-
mesh (53 um) screen. The residue obtained on 53 um
screen was washed in running tap water for one minute
and transferred into a beaker containing 0.5% Ca (OCL)2
and made up to 100 ml to produce 1:5 dilution. The
sclerotial suspension was put on a magnetic stirrer and 1
ml aliquot was evenly spread on to the surface of PDA
plates containing penicillin (100,000 units/l) and
streptomycin (0.2 g/l), Demosan 0.3 gm/litre and rose
Bengal 0.1 g/l. The plates were incubated at 28oC and in
five days grayish to black colonies of M. phaseolina
were identified.