Meeting the increasing food and energy demands of a growing population will require the development of ground-breaking strategies that promote sustainable plant production. Host-induced gene silencing has shown great potential for controlling pest and diseases in crop plants. However, while delivery of inhibitory noncoding double-stranded (ds)RNA by transgenic expression is a promising concept,...

1. Plant genotypic variation can shape associated arthropod and microbial communities locally, as has been demonstrated in controlled common garden experiments. However, the relative roles of plant genetics and the environment in defining communities at larger spatial scales are not well known. The environmental heterogeneity hypothesis maintains that plant genetic effects on associated communi...

Crop yield loss as a result of disease has an economic impact on many people. To protect against disease, plant pathologists have developed various fungicides and disease resistant cultivars. In parallel, pathogens have evolved to escape from disease protection measures through, for example, the emergence of fungicide resistant isolates and the breakdown of disease resistant cultivars. To resol...

Micromonospora is a Gram positive bacterium that can be isolated from nitrogen fixing nodules from healthy leguminous plants, where they could be beneficial to the plant. Their plant growth promoting activity in legume and non-legume plants has been previously demonstrated. The present study explores the ability of Micromonospora strains to control fungal pathogens and to stimulate plant immuni...

Biological control (biocontrol) agents act on plants via numerous mechanisms, and can be used to protect plants from pathogens. Biocontrol agents can act directly as pathogen antagonists or competitors or indirectly to promote plant induced systemic resistance (ISR). Whether a biocontrol agent acts directly or indirectly depends on the specific strain and the pathosystem type. We reported previ...

Understanding how plants balance between enabling microbial symbionts and fending off pathogens has direct implications both for basic plant biology and optimal use of crop plants in agriculture. The degree to which the processes associated with these two types of interactions overlap is poorly known. Recent studies revealed that symbiotic and pathogenic filamentous microbes require common plan...

Dematiaceous fungi are darkly pigmented, filamentary moulds and are common in the environment as plant saprophytes and pathogens. Incidental reports of corneal ulcers that have been caused by species of this group have appeared in the literature, but the relative importance of this species as potential comeal pathogens has not been appreciated. As a group, second to Fusarium solani and other mo...

Plant pathogens affect the fitness of their hosts and maintain biodiversity. However, we lack theories to predict the type and intensity of infections in wild plants. Here we demonstrate using fungal pathogens of tropical plants that an examination of the life histories of hosts and pathogens can reveal general patterns in their interactions. Fungal infections were more commonly reported for li...

Due to post-harvest losses more than 30% of harvested fruits will not reach the consumers' plate. Fungal pathogens play a key role in those losses, as they cause most of the fruit rots and the customer complaints. Many of the fungal pathogens are already present in the unripe fruit but remain quiescent during fruit growth until a particular phase of fruit ripening and senescence. The pathogens ...