Improving performance of microbial biocontrol agents against plant diseases

Abstract

Reducing dependence on chemical pesticides is considered as an essential challenge for sustainable crop production. The use of microbial biocontrol agents (MBCAs) is a key component of sustainable pest management. Numerous antagonistic microorganisms are known to suppress plant diseases, but their practical application and commercialization are still limited in part due to poor reliability of their efficacy in the field. Although promising MBCAs achieve remarkable disease control in the laboratory or greenhouse, field control is often unsatisfactory. Thus, for MBCAs to be integrated into crop production, their field performance must be improved to provide the cost-effectiveness and efficacy required by growers. In this review, we highlight recent approaches to enhance the field performance of MBCAs.

Soil Microbial Biogeography in a Changing World: Recent Advances and Future Perspectives

“…Future advances in microbial biogeography associated with the use of synthetic biology, new approaches for microbial culturing, and multiple bio-omics (e.g., metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics, and metabolomics) may help us to harness the soil microbiome to promote crop production and health in a changing world. We are still far from knowing what functions are being conducted by every single microbial species and their contribution to terrestrial functions, yet synthetic biology approaches and engineering of microorganisms have been postulated to boost ecosystem restoration, rhizospheredriven crop yield, and pest control (110,111), to fight global environmental change (112,113), and even to aid the terraformation of other moons and planets to make them more similar to Earth (114,115).…”

Combining Biocontrol Agents with Chemical Fungicides for Integrated Plant Fungal Disease Control

“…The potential of these has challenged researchers to develop chemical analogs with similar characteristics or distinct from known natural inducers of the plant's immunity [26,27]. However, despite intensive research, success in field trials using BCAs is very limited due to variations in ecological parameters like plant physiological and genetical status, climatological conditions, etc., which increase the variability of the desired BCA effect [28][29][30]. Therefore, their use is more restricted to the cultivation of greenhouse crops, where environmental conditions are more controllable [31].…”

Potential of preventive bioremediation to reduce environmental contamination by pesticides in an agricultural context: A case study with the herbicide 2,4-D

“…the successive Ecophyto and Ecophyto II+ action plans in France (Légifrance, 2019) or the Directives 2009/128/EC and 2019/782 for the European Union). Indeed, alternative solutions to pesticide use, such as biocontrol or bio-stimulation, are the subject of intense research but often their efficiency does not meet expectations (Syed Ab Rahman et al, 2018;Ferreira et al, 2019;Köhl et al, 2019;Marian and Shimizu, 2019;Blake et al, 2020), thus limiting their use in practice for the moment. For that reason, pesticide use cannot yet be completely avoided and the remediation of pesticide-polluted environments is still of great interest.…”