Solanum palinacanthum Dunal as a potential eggplant rootstock resistant to root‐knot nematodes

Abstract

Some plant-parasitic nematodes (PPN) are infamous for their pathogenicity, which leads to economic losses in agriculture. Root-knot nematodes (RKN, Meloidogyne spp.), an obligatory PPN, is one of the most common genera and is prevalent in many tropical and subtropical regions. Major Meloidogyne spp. generally have a wide range of host plants and cause severe losses of marketable yield in susceptible crops by inhibiting growth and reducing appearance quality by root galling. Among its host crops, Solanaceae has been intensively studied for RKN management because the family includes economically important crops, such as eggplant Solanum melongena L.which has an estimated global production of approx. 55 million tons (FAOSTAT, 2019).Conventional RKN management has adopted chemical nematicides, but these days their use is problematic from the standpoints of both sustainability and toxicity to the natural environment and human (Desaeger et al.