Emerging Methods for Biological Control of Barley Diseases Including the Role of Endophytes

Abstract

Barley is an important crop worldwide with production largely used for animal feed and alcoholic beverages. Diseases are a major limiting factor to its production. Th ese have, up until recently, been controlled by agrochemicals. However, legislation on the use of agrochemicals, especially within the European Union, is being tightened and there is growing interest in integrated pest management . Th is means that there is an increasing focus on controlling diseases using biological control . Living microorganisms that are applied as biological control agents (BCAs) to either soil, seed or leaves can have diffi culty in persisting. Th erefore, the focus of this review is on endophytes, which are microorganisms that live inside the plant without causing symptoms of disease and have the potential of staying protected as well as being benefi cial to the plant and eff ective against multiple diseases. In this review, we discuss the diff erent approaches for fi nding and testing benefi cial endophytes and for determining the endophyte host range. Furthermore, we undertook a literature search to summarise previous studies that have investigated the use of endophytes as well as BCAs against barley diseases.

Fungal Endophytes Isolated from Elymus repens, a Wild Relative of Barley, Have Potential for Biological Control of Fusarium culmorum and Pyrenophora teres in Barley

“…Only a limited number of studies have investigated the control of barley diseases using endophytes [ 2 ]. If the endophytic lifestyle of the biocontrol agent is the reason for the reduction of disease symptoms, then it is relevant to examine the colonisation of the isolate and certainly if the endophyte has been isolated from a different species than the crop [ 36 ].…”

“…Barley is the fourth most produced cereal crop in the world [ 1 ] and barley diseases result in great yield losses [ 2 ]. Some of the most important diseases in Northern Europe include leaf blotch caused by Rhynchosporium graminicola, Ramularia leaf spot (caused by Ramularia collo-cygni ), Fusarium head blight (FHB, caused by Fusarium spp.)…”

“…of forage grasses have been shown to provide both abiotic and biotic stress relief and the vertical transmission affirms the mutually beneficial symbiosis [ 19 , 20 ]. Some endophytes have been shown to protect plants against disease [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 ] and the use of endophytes against barley diseases was reviewed previously [ 2 ].…”

Endophyte ecology, diversity and utilisation

“…Other important aspects of endophyte effects on plants relate to nutrient uptake and use, and biocontrol activity (Murphy et al 2014;Høyer et al 2019). Yakti et al (2018) have shown that two model Dark Septate Endophytes (DSE) improved nitrogen uptake in tomato from organic sources and suggested that this might be due to nutrient mobilisation rather than hyphal transport to the plant.…”

Morphological Signs of Barley Spot Pathogens in the Conditions of the Almaty Region

“…Recent studies on the study of barley diseases with soil infection were carried out to develop a strategy for protecting barley seedlings from infection caused by Sclerotium rolfsii using soil infested with the antagonist fungi Trichoderma (Faruk, 2019), study the effect hydrothermal stress on the development of soil infections in wheat and barley (Toropova et al, 2018), evaluate the effectiveness of pre-sowing seed treatment against infection caused by Fusarium spp. and Cochliobolus sativus (Sooväli et al, 2017), develop protective measures (Gangwar et al, 2018;Høyer et al, 2019;Singh, 2017), identify the soil-habitat barley mosaic virus (Cadot et al, 2017) and study the antagonistic activity of bacterial species of the Bacillus genus on the B. sorokiniana barley as pathogenic fungi (Harba et al, 2020). Currently, there is no research in Kazakhstan on barley diseases with soil infection.…”