Edited and reviewed by: Jesús Navas-Castillo, IHSM La Mayora, CSIC, Spain
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Ensuring food security for a rapidly growing human population requires colossal efforts to increase the yield of crops, especially under the threat of climate change. The currently employed methodologies in agriculture have not been able to significantly prevent and diminish crop losses due to plant diseases and this has been a major concern during the last decade. Crops are affected by a wide range of pathogens, including bacteria, fungi, and viruses, causing infections that are responsible for significant yield losses in several economically important crop species, posing a challenge to global food security and the agricultural industry.
Scientists have made great efforts to explore possible solutions to manage economically important phytopathogens. One of the most employed methods consists of using chemical pesticides or fungicides. However, there have been several concerns regarding the health and environmental effects of pesticides, as well as the risk of potential phenomena related to the development of resistant pathogenic strains to fungicides. Therefore, other strategies have had to be taken, such as biological control agents (Pandit et al.,
In this Research Topic, the editors aimed to offer a selection of six articles that address different strategies for a broad overview of modern and innovative plant protection.
Exploring the search for a new chemical fungicide,
Other strategies include genetic engineering, which has facilitated the production of genetically modified crops for years. Recently, gene-editing techniques, such as CRISPR/Cas9, have been successfully implemented to enhance disease resistance in several important crops. In this issue, there are two articles that use this technology.
Climate change amplifies plant diseases by changing the range and behavior of crop pests and pathogens.
Plants are in constant collaborative and competitive community with several microorganisms, which is crucial for crop disease and adversity resistance, growth, and development.
There are some bacteria that also act as phytopathogens. This is the case with the last article topic.
This selection of articles describes a range of different strategies that can be applied to control phytopathogens on several crops under different environmental conditions in various cropping systems. Considering the recent developments in sustainable crop protection and production, we believe that these articles will be interesting for researchers and farmers for the reliability of the results obtained.
NC: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. UD: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. CK: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. ES: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
We thank the authors of the papers published in this Research Topic for their valuable contributions. We also thank the editorial board of Frontiers in Microbiology, the submissions team, and the Frontiers specialists. CK gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation on the Young Scientist Laboratory within the framework of the Interregional Scientific and Educational Center of the South of Russia (No. FENW-2024-0001) and the Strategic Academic Leadership Program of the Southern Federal University (Priority 2030).
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.
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