Using biological fertilizers and pesticides based on beneficial soil microbes in order to reduce mineral fertilizers and chemical pesticides in conventional agriculture is still a matter of debate. In this regard, a European research project seeks to elucidate the role of root-endophytic fungi and to develop molecular tools to trace and quantify these fungi in the rhizosphere and root tissue. T...

The scarcity of fresh water in the Mediterranean region necessitates the search for halotolerant agents of biological control of plant diseases that can be applied in arid-zone agriculture irrigated with saline water. Among 29 Trichoderma strains previously isolated from Mediterranean Psammocinia sp. sponges, the greatest number of isolates belong to the Trichoderma longibrachiatum-Hypocrea ori...

BACKGROUND The tropolone-tolerant Trichoderma virens PS1-7 is a biocontrol agent against Burkholderia plantarii, causative of rice seedling blight. When exposed to catechol, this fungus dose-dependently produced carot-4-en-9,10-diol, a sesquiterpene-type autoregulatory signal molecule that promotes self-conidiation of T. virens PS1-7 mycelia. It was, however, uncertain why T. virens PS1-7 atten...

False smut of rice, caused by Ustilaginoidea virens (Cooke) Takahashi (teleomorph: Villosiclava virens), is one of the most important diseases affecting rice worldwide. Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation was used to identify functional genes in U. virens. In this study, we selected a single-copy insertion mutant T133 with deficiency in producing conidia by screening the T-DNA ins...

Studies were undertaken to determine the comparative efficacy of native biocontrol agents viz., Pseudomonas fluorescens isolate PS-4, Trichoderma harzianum isolate TH-H-3 and T. virens isolate TV-K-3 @ 5X10 cfu/g talc; organic amendments viz., neem seed powder @ 250 mg/kg soil and farmyard manure @ 8 1500 mg/kg soil; carbofuran @ 33.4 mg/kg soil, topsin-M @ 1.4 mg/kg soil and bavistin @ 2.0 mg/...

The investigation was carried out at the laboratory of Plant Pathology Department, SASRD, Nagaland University (NU), Medziphema Campus, Nagaland, India during year kharif (August-October, 2020) to evaluate antagonistic potentiality Trichoderma spp. (T. harzianum, T. asperellum and virens) against three diseases pigeonpea viz. Alternaria leaf spot (Alternaria alternata), Collar rot (Sclerotium ro...