Biological Control of Plant Diseases: Opportunities and Limitations
Plant diseases are important challenge to agriculture worldwide. Annually millions of tons of agricultural produce are lost due to the actions of plants pathogens. Past historical evidences are available showing the great mass migration and death of human
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Biological Control of Plant Diseases: Opportunities and Limitations Akanksha Singh, Vipin Kumar Singh, Abhishek Kumar Dwivedy, Deepika, Shikha Tiwari, Awanindra Dwivedi, and Nawal Kishore Dubey
Abstract Plant diseases are important challenge to agriculture worldwide. Annually millions of tons of agricultural produce are lost due to the actions of plants pathogens. Past historical evidences are available showing the great mass migration and death of humans caused by the disease outbreak. Currently, several measures have been adopted to control the loss of crop productivity caused by fungal diseases. Physical and chemical approaches have gained huge success in managing the plant diseases, but being costly and toxic to natural environment in most of the cases, these are not preferred by the farmers. Moreover, the use of agrochemicals to control the plant pathogens has evoked the phenomenon of pest resistance and thus aggravating the seriousness of plant diseases and loss of crop productivity. To minimize the risks of synthetic chemicals, biological control measures have been introduced to control the fast multiplication of several plant diseases; however, under natural environmental conditions, their efficiency is very much affected. Plant systems have evolved several mechanisms to deal with the encountered pathogens. Enhancing the plant immunity against diseases caused by important plant pathogens by identifying and introducing the genes promoting the diseases resistance may serve as a good option in near future to control the plant disease for human welfare.
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Introduction
Plant diseases have always been a challenge to plant growth and crop production in several parts of the world. Plant diseases can affect plants productivity by interfering with several processes such as the absorbance and translocation of water and nutrients, photosynthesis, flower and fruit development, and plant growth and
A. Singh · V. K. Singh · A. K. Dwivedy · Deepika · S. Tiwari · N. K. Dubey (*) Centre of Advanced Study in Botany, Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India e-mail: [email protected] A. Dwivedi National Centre for Disease Control, New Delhi, India © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Varma et al. (eds.), Plant Microbiome Paradigm, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50395-6_7
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development. The infection of plants by pathogens can have serious consequences on plant health that further affects human health in several ways. Plant diseases are well-known to reduce the food availability to humans by ultimately interfering with crop yields. Some major outbreaks of plant diseases are the Irish Potato Famine (from 1845 to 1849) also known as the Great Hunger, caused by fungus Phytophthora infestans culminated into rapid disease spread throughout Ireland and ruined one-half of the potato crop during this period and about three-quarters of the crop over the next 7 years. Due to this famine, Ireland’s 1845 population of eight million dropped to 5.5 million by 1860. In India, Bengal
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