3GE Collection on Agriculture - Plant Pathogen Resistance Biotechnology

3GE Collection on Agriculture: Plant Pathogen Resistance Biotechnology

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2023 | ISBN: 1984680846 | English | 326 pages | True PDF | 29 MB
In the new millennium, humanity faces challenges it has been putting off for too long. Among the greatest of these is meeting the food demand of an estimated 9 billion people by the year 2050—a rapid increase. Agricultural production, water availability, and climate change are also being negatively impacted. While plants are exposed to a wide range of pests and pathogens—including bacteria, fungi, oomycetes, viruses, nematodes, and insects—these only cause disease in specific interactions. However, pre-harvest pests and pathogens currently affect 26% of worldwide crop production each year. Growing human populations, the loss of agricultural land due to climate change, erosion, and water scarcity require that we minimize production losses caused by these pathogens. Since domestication, plant breeding has been the most successful way to develop new crop varieties, enabling significant advances in food production and societal development.
Plant resistance plays a vital role in adjusting crop production to meet global population growth. Whenever resilient varieties and agrochemicals are deployed to control diseases, they are usually highly effective. However, the evolutionary potential of many plant pathogens can rapidly lead to the emergence of novel genotypes resistant to specific genes or phytosanitary products through mutation or recombination. When this occurs, disease control approaches can quickly become ineffective as these novel genotypes increase in frequency through natural selection and spread to other locations, causing control failures over large geographic areas.