Abstract
Endophytic fungi (EF) are increasingly gaining attention due to the numerous benefits many species can offer to the plant host, while reducing the application of chemicals in agriculture, thus providing advantages to human health and the environment. The growing demand for safer agrifood products and the challenge of increasing food production with a lower use of pesticides and fertilizers stimulates investigations on the use and understanding of EF. Other than direct consequences on the plant damaging agents, these microorganisms can also deliver bioactive metabolites with antimicrobial, insecticidal, or plant biostimulant activities. In tomato, EF are artificially introduced as biological control agents or naturally acquired from the surrounding environment. To date, the applications of EF to tomato has been generally limited to a restricted group of beneficial fungi. In this work, considerations are made to the effects and methods of introduction and detection of EF on tomato plants, consolidating in a review the main findings that regard pest and pathogen control, and improvement of plant performance. Moreover, a survey was undertaken of the naturally occurring constitutive endophytes present in this horticultural crop, with the aim to evaluate the potential role in the selection of new beneficial EF useful for tomato crop improvement.
Highlights
Different approaches can be used to discover alternatives to chemical pesticides, to prevent or control harmful plant biotic agents
The utilization of endophytic fungi (EF) as biological control agents (BCA) represents a potential alternative that meets the growing need for more eco-sustainable agriculture. According to this new perspective, in recent years many studies have been performed, introducing EF on tomato to test their effects on plant performance. Among these introduced EF, a consistent number of species belongs to a group of fungi classified as entomopathogens, fungi that are pathogens to insects, many isolated from asymptomatic plants, including Akanthomyces spp., Beauveria bassiana, Clonostachys rosea, Cordyceps farinosa, Lecanicillium spp., and Sarocladium spp. [39,57,58,59,60,61]
In order to successfully develop applications of plant-associated EF in sustainable agricultural production, further investigations are necessary to understand the mechanisms of action and the processes employed by the fungi to produce the beneficial effects, as well as to determine how they can be efficiently utilized in actual practices
Summary
Different approaches can be used to discover alternatives to chemical pesticides, to prevent or control harmful plant biotic agents. Among the plant favorable fungi, fungal endophytes, in particular, have been gaining increased attention because of the numerous benefits they can offer directly to the plant host with the intimate interaction established during the colonization of the plant tissues [3,4,5,6,7] Since their discovery, endophytes have been isolated from different vegetative structures, many diverse plant species, both in natural uncultivated, as well as in agricultural environments [8]. Endophytes have been isolated from different vegetative structures, many diverse plant species, both in natural uncultivated, as well as in agricultural environments [8] These endophytic fungi (EF) represent a microbial community with an enormous reserve of biodiversity, originating from diverse ecological niches and host tissues ranging from the algae living in marine environments [9] to trees in the forest ecosystems [10]. A section of this review is dedicated to constitutive EF isolated and identified from tomato, which can serve as a valuable source of new microbial beneficial applications with unexplored potential to improve the production of tomato and other crops
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