Antifungal action of Lippia alba essential oil in Rhizoctonia solani disease management

Abstract

Plant pathogens damage agriculture sector to a large extent, resulted in poor crop yield and quality. A well followed practice to curb plant diseases are mostly involved with application of conventional fungicides (synthetic chemical). However, their continuous and uncontrolled use has emerged as big challenge for humans due to the hazardous effect to the environment. This can also leads to the development of resistance to plant pathogens. Green chemistry based approaches have revolutionized the development of new strategies to curb plant diseases. Natural products mainly essential oils have potential to minimize the use of synthetic fungicides for some extent. Therefore, current study was conducted to find out alternative of disease managements strategies against Rhizoctonia solani damping off. The rationale was to study the effect of linalool rich Lippia essential oil against two R. solani isolates infecting commercially important crops, Ocimum basilicum and Plantago ovata. Current study revealed that the use of essential oil emulsion can enhance the survivability of seedlings up to 98% and 92% in treated O. basilicum and P. ovata pots as comparison to non-treated pots 20% and 15%, respectively. Headspace-gas chromatography of treated soil samples have detected minimum oil components leading to lower exposures. Herein, we demonstrated a successful management of damping off disease on two commercially important crops for two consecutive years at nurseries. The isolates of R. solani were further characterized up to sub group level for the first time. In conclusion, Lippia essential oil could be used as biopesticide to treat damping of disease at nursery level.