Alternative strategies to protect mediterranean crops and agricultural products

Agriculture cannot rely on agrochemicals for much longer. Our understanding of the effects of traditional plant protection strategies on the environment has been changing over the past decades, and in the same way we need to change our approach to plant protection. Our lab is committed in looking for alternative strategies to protect our crops and postharvest products from plant pathogens. We focus on two major topics.

Plant extracts. Several plant species evolved metabolites to protect themselves against pests and pathogens, and parts of plants and plant extracts have been used for centuries to protect crops and agricultural products. Our lab joins the worldwide collective effort on using plant extracts to control plant pathogens. In this sense, we achieved particularly interesting results using an alcoholic extract of pomegranate peel (PGE), a byproduct of fruit juice production. We show that this product has great bioactive action against several plant pathogens, both in-vivo and in-vivo, in the lab and in the field. While we do not stop to look for new sources of bioactive compounds, we are now look at the potential mechanisms behind the bioactivity of PGE, which might unveil new potential tools to protect our crops.

Microbes and microbial metabolites. Similarly to plants, also microbes evolved strategies to protect themselves or to improve their ability to compete for resources. Biocontrol agents are widely used in plant protection, but in our lab we aim to take a step further. Our goal is to exploit the microbial biodiversity of natural environments, running large scale assays that can help to find microorganisms with high bioactivity against major plant pathogens. This already allowed us to find several strains of Pseudomonas that can protect fruits from common postharvest pathogens. While building a bigger and more diverse library of microorganisms, we are now digging deeper on their mechanisms of action to better understand the ways we can unleash their full potential in plant protection.