Can waste serve as a source of known or novel molecules for plant disease management? This review explores this question, which is closely linked to the necessity of mitigating the environmental impact of agriculture, specifically in terms of waste generation and greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, it addresses the increasing demand for safer, environmentally friendly alternatives to ensure sustainable plant production and protection. To satisfy these needs, research efforts over the past few decades have primarily focused on biocontrol strategies, with the valorization of waste being addressed only recently. Different approaches have been applied for extracting bioactive molecules from waste, ranging from green chemistry to microbial fermentation. We discuss secondary metabolites, elicitors, and biosurfactants obtained chemically and from fermentation. Microorganisms growing on waste can produce biomass or spores [bioactive ingredients of plant-protection products (PPPs)] and facilitate the extraction of active compounds. Although the production of spores on waste material is now well-established on an industrial scale, the extraction of biologicals from waste and/or their production through fermentation are still at the experimental stage. The growing knowledge on the bioactivity of agri-food waste-derived molecules against phytopathogens is paving the way for the development of new PPPs suitable for integrated pest management. The waste-based PPPs pipeline described here shows strong potential to generate both established and novel, regulation-compliant compounds without sacrificing disease-control efficacy.
Plant-parasitic nematodes are increasingly important in turfgrass systems due to changes in public demands for high turfgrass quality standards and low environmental impacts, loss of heavy metal pesticides along with the development of new nematode management tools, and the expanding range of some highly virulent species. This has subsequently increased demand for turfgrass nematode diagnosis, and many diagnostic labs struggle with proper interpretation of these samples. In this review, we discuss some of the factors contributing to the increased demand for turfgrass nematode diagnostics and the challenges of providing meaningful results. We also provide a review of the different families of plant-parasitic nematodes associated with turfgrasses in North America and their relative importance.
Airborne dispersal enables plant pathogens to travel across fields, regions, and continents, fueling rapid epidemics and emerging disease threats. Biosurveillance, the systematic monitoring of airborne inoculum, offers the opportunity to detect pathogens before symptoms appear and informs timely, risk-based management. Recent advances in air sampling, molecular diagnostics, metagenomics, and imaging technologies have expanded the scale and resolution of pathogen monitoring, from single-species qPCR assays to community-level aerobiome surveys. Integration of biosurveillance data with decision-support systems, remote sensing, and artificial intelligence is transforming early-warning capabilities and providing novel insights into pathogen ecology, evolution, and fungicide resistance. Yet major challenges remain, including assay standardization, data interpretation, and translation into actionable tools for growers. This review synthesizes current approaches, highlights case studies in which biosurveillance has advanced disease management, and outlines future directions toward coordinated surveillance networks and precision agriculture applications.
Phytophthora infestans killed the potato crop in Ireland in 1845, leading to widespread famine and the death of more than one million people. Historic herbarium specimens from the famine era were used to understand the pathogen's biology and track its global spread, providing a valuable resource for research. Historic outbreaks in the United States and Europe were caused by the FAM-1 lineage, whereas the US-1 lineage spread later. The famine lineage was basal in the phylogeny and ancestral to modern US-1, Mexican, and globally aggressive lineages. An admixture between the famine lineage and the Andean species Phytophthora andina was revealed, indicating a South American origin of the disease. Temporal changes in the presence and abundance of virulence genes were observed in historic compared to modern genomes. Expansion in effector abundance occurred as new genotypes emerged in the mid-twentieth century. Disease surveillance and genotyping on a global scale have helped to inform disease management.
