- classification : Fungi, Basidiomycota, Agaricomycotina, Agaricomycetes, Agaricomycetidae, Atheliales, Atheliaceae
- synonymie : Sclerotium rolfsii Sacc. (1911)
- English denomination: Athelia stem rot, Sclerotium stem rot, Southern wilt ...



Athelia rolfsii (ex Sclerotium rolfsii ) is a soil-borne basidiomycete, very polyphagous , particularly rampant in warm tropical and subtropical regions . It mainly affects tomato crops in soil and a very large number of other plants, whether cultivated or not (several hundred belonging to botanical families representing both mono- and dicotyledons).

If this fungus is particularly frequent and feared in many market garden soils of the overseas departments and territories, and relatively rare in metropolitan France ; its damage is sometimes observed in a few vegetable or ornamental production areas of the Côte-d'Azur, the Pyrénées-Orientales and the Basque Country. We recently identified it on tomato plants grown under plastic tunnels in the Pyrénées-Orientales. A more surprising situation, we detected it in 2006 in an industrial tomato crop located near Libourne, in the southwest.