Abstract
Major losses of crop yield and quality caused by soil-borne plant diseases have long threatened the ecology and economy of agriculture and forestry. Biological control using beneficial microorganisms has become more popular for management of soil-borne pathogens as an environmentally friendly method for protecting plants. Two major barriers limiting the disease-suppressive functions of biocontrol microbes are inadequate colonization of hosts and inefficient inhibition of soil-borne pathogen growth, due to biotic and abiotic factors acting in complex rhizosphere environments. Use of a consortium of microbial strains with disease inhibitory activity may improve the biocontrol efficacy of the disease-inhibiting microbes. The mechanisms of biological control are not fully understood. In this review, we focus on bacterial and fungal biocontrol agents to summarize the current state of the use of single strain and multi-strain biological control consortia in the management of soil-borne diseases. We discuss potential mechanisms used by microbial components to improve the disease suppressing efficacy. We emphasize the interaction-related factors to be considered when constructing multiple-strain biological control consortia and propose a workflow for assembling them by applying a reductionist synthetic community approach.
Highlights
The interest in control of plant diseases by beneficial microbes, has increased recently due to the global need for environmentally friendly alternatives to chemical pesticides and fertilizers (Handelsman and Stabb, 1996; Fira et al, 2018; Syed Ab Rahman et al, 2018)
Building multi-strain biological control agents (MSBCAs) by a reductionist synthetic communities (SynCom) approach (Figure 2B) offers the chance to accurately and rapidly pick out the microbial strains qualified for establishing the MSBCA from thousands of isolates found in the natural host microbiome
The crucial disease control-interactions present in the plant microbiome (Hassani et al, 2018) can be mirrored in the few selected strains used for the MSBCA
Summary
The interest in control of plant diseases by beneficial microbes, has increased recently due to the global need for environmentally friendly alternatives to chemical pesticides and fertilizers (Handelsman and Stabb, 1996; Fira et al, 2018; Syed Ab Rahman et al, 2018). Numerous beneficial microbial strains performed well against pathogens under controlled conditions in the laboratory or the greenhouse, examples of successful BCA application in commercial field-based crop production are rare (Xu et al, 2011; Mazzola and Freilich, 2017) This is mainly due to inadequate colonization of host rhizosphere connected with inefficient inhibition of soil-borne pathogen growth (Sarma et al, 2015; Mazzola and Freilich, 2017). Novel diseasesuppressive strains might overcome inadequate colonization of the host rhizosphere and inefficient inhibition of soilborne pathogen growth, the discovery of taxonomically novel isolates possessing biological disease control activity becomes more difficult over time even after extensive searches Another promising approach, exploiting genetically modified microbial strains with improved antagonistic function has been restricted or prohibited worldwide (Migheli, 2001; Stemke, 2004). Bacillus subtilis EPB56, Bacillus Root soaking Fusarium wilt subtilis EPB10 and Pseudomonas fluorescens Pf1
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