Abstract:Bacterial wilt is one of the most serious diseases of sesame in south China. This disease usually severely reduces the yield of sesame. Besides usual typical symptoms of overwilt, gap on the top part of stem, there had symptoms of sesame wilt, including deformation, alveolar bulge with bacterial ooze on stem, gap on the lower part of stem, filiform bacterial ooze in broken stem appeared in the 2-year field studies. The strains isolated from the sample of sesame bacterial wilt were identified as Ralstonia solanacearum based on their morphology, cultural characteristics, pathogenicity test and tobacco anaphylaxis. The sequence analyses of 16S rRNA gene and 16S-23S rRNA gene ITS demonstrated 99%-100% similarity to R.solanacearum. Biovar test of 22 isolates which collected from 15 counties in Jiangxi Province showed that 20 strains belong to biovar Ⅲ, and 2 strans belong to biovar Ⅳ, accounted for 90.91% and 9.09% of the 22 isolates, respectively. It means that biovar Ⅲ is a dominant pathogen induced sesame bacterial wilt epidemics.