Plant Allelopathy: Mechanisms and Applications in Regenerative Agriculture

Dear Colleagues,

Allelopathy is defined as an inhibitory or beneficial chemical interference between plants, plants and microorganisms and between microorganisms. Functional molecules, named allelochemicals, belong to diverse chemical classes of plant and microbial secondary metabolites. In a holistic view it is increasingly recognized that both, plant and microbial secondary compounds contribute to allelopathy. Moreover, plants and microorganisms have functions in detoxification and removal of harmful molecules or potentiate their toxicity by compound modulation, thus ameliorating or reducing/eliminating allelopathic success. Allelochemicals must be released into the environment, a prerequisite for uptake by another plant or to get in contact with microorganisms. Here, several mechanisms are possible, active and passive ones, encompassing the release of bound allelochemicals by microbial activities from decaying plant material. Adsorbed at roots surfaces, allelochemicals can influence root colonizing microorganisms, their interaction with the host plant and the metabolism, growth and development of the host/ target plant. While it is long known that allelopathy is a strategy of plants to prevail against other plants, chemical interference between plants and microorganisms, and between plant and soil colonizing microorganisms are more recently investigated. These interactions are of crucial importance for the use of allelopathy for weed control in agriculture, in particular as Green Technologies will be favored in future culture systems. They will also launch a discussion about breeding of novel crop cultivars with a higher allelopathic potential or of those with higher levels of tolerance towards allelopathic compounds. Here, co-evolutionary aspects have to be considered, since many weeds have already evolved strategies to cope with certain allelochemicals, sometimes supported by microorganisms, often acting in concert for complete allelochemical degradation. Allelochemicals can severely influence the microbial diversity, being an indirect tool to suppress plants by manipulating associated microbial communities/ microbiome compositions and species richness. This Special Issue will cover recent insights in plant and plant-microbe allelopathic interactions under laboratory and field conditions, in agricultural methods for allelopathic weed control, in tolerance strategies of plant and microorganisms against allelochemicals and in allelochemical degradation as the latter is important to fulfill non-residue degradation to avoid environmental contaminations, a quality criterion of Green Technologies towards a more sustainable agriculture as requested by the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity Strategies of the UE Green Deal Program.

Dr. Margot Schulz
Dr. Vincenzo Tabaglio
Guest Editors

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