Search Results (175)

Aquaculture has emerged as one of the fastest-growing sectors of global food production, driven by population growth, consumer demand, and technological innovation. Despite this expansion, the industry continues to face persistent challenges, including disease management, optimizing growth and product quality, maintaining water quality, and mitigating environmental impacts. Nanotechnology has recently emerged as a promising tool to tackle these issues, offering both direct applications, such as antimicrobial agents, immunostimulants, and optimized drug delivery to enhance fish health, and indirect applications, including post-harvest processing, environmental monitoring, and contaminant removal. This review provides a comprehensive overview of nanoparticle applications in aquaculture from 2020 to early 2026, covering the various types of nanoparticles, their mechanisms of action, and the specific materials investigated during this period. The discussion also addresses potential benefits, limitations, and biosafety concerns, emphasizing the need for further in vivo and field studies to ensure the safe and sustainable integration of nanotechnologies into aquaculture practices. Full article

Stem-end rot (SER) is an important postharvest disease that reduces the quality and marketability of star apple (Chrysophyllum cainito L.), while biological control offers a more sustainable alternative to chemical management. This study aimed to (i) select fungal strains causing SER disease in star apple and (ii) select and appraise strains of Trichoderma spp. fungi as antagonists to the selected fungi causing SER disease under in vitro conditions. Ten fungal isolates were obtained from symptomatic fruits, and 35 Trichoderma isolates were recovered from star apple rhizosphere soils. Five rapidly growing fungal isolates were evaluated using a detached-fruit pathogenicity assay, with three fruits per treatment. The five strains with the strongest expression of SER were selected and identified as Lasiodiplodia theobromae L-SA01, L-SA03, and L-SA07, L. venezuelensis L-SA02, and L. egytiacae L-SA06. Among 25 Trichoderma isolates screened for extracellular enzyme activities, T-SA05, T-SA30, and T-SA32 were selected for broad antagonistic activity and were provisionally associated with T. asperellum, T. yunnanense, and T. viride, respectively. At 72 h, these isolates showed antagonistic efficiencies of 55.4–58.9% against L-SA01, 64.9–69.6% against L-SA02, 80.8–82.4% against L-SA03, 58.6–59.3% against L-SA06, and 49.9–54.1% against L-SA07. L. venezuelensis and L. egytiacae were the two fungal species first found to cause SER. T. yunnanense was recently proven to control the Lasiodiplodia spp. fungi that cause SER. The selected isolates also exhibited chitinase and glucanase activities, although their enzyme profiles did not fully correspond to their antagonistic efficiencies. These findings identify indigenous Trichoderma isolates for further taxonomic confirmation and evaluation in postharvest fruit assays. Full article

Specialty crop industries generate heterogeneous knowledge across cultivation, pest and disease management, post-harvest handling, quality control, and marketing, yet this knowledge is often dispersed across technical documents, web resources, relational datasets, and expert experience. Taking the jujube (Ziziphus jujuba Mill.) industry as a case study, this study develops a reproducible ontology-constrained knowledge-engineering framework. A lifecycle-oriented domain ontology and a curated knowledge graph prototype were constructed from verified ontology-aligned records, while unstructured texts were used to evaluate prospective information-extraction components. Four BERT-based named entity recognition models were compared under leakage-controlled five-fold cross-validation, and versioned ontology-constrained trigger rules were evaluated under a gold-entity setting. The final ontology contained 457 RDF triples, 38 classes, 13 object properties, and 71 data properties, and logical consistency checks detected no inconsistent named classes. BERT-Softmax obtained the highest mean NER F1-score (0.328 ± 0.146) in this small corpus, but the fold variability does not support a general claim of superiority over CRF-based architectures. Under gold entities, the refined trigger rules achieved an F1-score of 0.683 ± 0.142; in a stricter diagnostic using automatically predicted fine-grained entities, end-to-end relation extraction declined to 0.035 ± 0.054. On a 93-question benchmark generated from verified graph triples, the rule-graph QA engine achieved a token-level F1-score of 0.973 and a tail-set exact accuracy of 98.9%, primarily reflecting relation mapping and graph retrieval correctness. A separate 20-question human-authored challenge audit found three partially supported questions and no fully supported question, illustrating the boundary beyond graph-grounded retrieval. The results provide case-specific, exploratory evidence that explicit ontology constraints can support reproducible knowledge organization and verifiable retrieval under limited domain data; they do not establish deployment-level or unrestricted agricultural QA performance. Full article

Generation time is the principal bottleneck constraining genetic gain in plant breeding. Speed breeding (SB) addresses this by simultaneously managing the photoperiod, light spectrum and intensity, temperature, CO₂ concentration, mineral nutrition, growing substrate volume, and post-harvest seed dormancy, enabling four to seven generations per year in long-day cereals and legumes, and four to five generations in optimised short-day systems. This review evaluates SB against the conventional pedigree framework; synthesises validated environmental parameters and crop-specific protocols; and examines principal SB applications in hybridisation, genomic selection, disease-resistance screening, and allele introgression. A structured comparison of major review and protocol papers identifies broad consensus on core parameters alongside genuine divergence on far-red light supplementation. Critical evaluation addresses genotype-by-environment interaction, incomplete trait coverage, infrastructure costs, and unresolved questions on the biological integrity of rapidly advanced generations. The review further discusses new genomic techniques (NGTs), particularly CRISPR/Cas9-based gene editing, in the context of the EU’s June 2026 NGT regulation, under which Category 1 plants carrying only targeted endogenous modifications are exempt from GMO authorisation. When combined with SB, this regulatory shift can compress the interval from gene-editing event to registered variety from decades to a few years. Speed breeding, NGTs, and conventional field-based selection are most productively treated as complementary elements of a unified pipeline. Full article

Fruit preharvest–postharvest quality assessment is essential for precision harvesting, intelligent grading, storage management, and supply-chain loss reduction. However, conventional approaches mainly rely on single-point postharvest inspection and cannot adequately capture the long-term effects of preharvest fruit phenotypes and environmental dynamics on quality formation. To address limited prediction accuracy under few-label conditions, insufficient multimodal fusion, and weak cross-orchard generalization, this study proposes FruitSSL-QNet, a self-supervised multimodal learning framework for jointly modeling preharvest fruit images, environmental sensor time series, and postharvest quality indicators. The framework employs visual masked reconstruction to learn fine-grained phenotype features, including color, texture, lenticel distribution, disease spots, and maturity patterns. Environmental temporal masked modeling is used to capture the cumulative effects of temperature, humidity, light intensity, soil moisture, and rainfall. Bidirectional cross-attention, gated fusion, and contrastive alignment are further integrated to learn complementary and semantically consistent image–environment representations. Experimental results demonstrate that FruitSSL-QNet outperforms SVM, Random Forest, XGBoost, LSTM, GRU, TCN, Transformer, and MM-Transformer across multiple quality assessment tasks. The proposed model achieves a maturity recognition accuracy of $89.6\%$, exceeding MM-Transformer by $4.4$ percentage points. Compared with the corresponding baseline results, the prediction errors for sugar content, firmness, and shelf life are reduced by $21.1\%$, $22.2\%$, and $22.5\%$, respectively. The decay-risk AUC reaches $0.921$, and the cross-site F1-score reaches $0.867$, indicating strong risk discrimination and stable generalization across orchard environments. Ablation experiments further confirm the contributions of visual self-supervision, environmental temporal self-supervision, and cross-modal alignment. Full article

Alternaria alternata often causes preharvest potato early blight and postharvest tuber rot, which can result in substantial yield losses. Demethylation inhibitors (DMIs) are widely used to control Alternaria diseases. However, the underlying resistance risk remains poorly understood. In this study, 114 A. alternata isolates from five major potato-producing regions in Shandong, China, were evaluated for sensitivity to four DMIs (mefentrifluconazole, prothioconazole, tebuconazole, and difenoconazole). The mean EC₅₀ values were 0.622, 6.053, 4.763, and 0.651 mg·L⁻¹, respectively. The Shapiro–Wilk test confirmed unimodal sensitivity distributions, allowing these mean EC₅₀ values to serve as baseline sensitivities. Two-year, two-location field trials demonstrated good control efficacy for all fungicides, with mefentrifluconazole exhibiting the highest efficacy. Three resistant mutants produced by artificial selection in the laboratory exhibited 3.78-, 28.06-, and 15.73-fold higher EC₅₀ values and showed fitness costs, including reduced or comparable mycelial growth, sporulation, and spore germination, pathogenicity similar to that of the parental strain, and lower temperature adaptability. By establishing the first baseline sensitivity of A. alternata from potato to these four DMI fungicides and assessing the resistance risk of mefentrifluconazole, this study provides a basis for rational fungicide application, resistance management, and future field resistance monitoring. Full article

Pre- and postharvest losses caused by fungal infections represent one of the greatest constraints in agricultural production worldwide. Due to increasingly stringent regulations, as well as environmental and health concerns associated with their use, synthetic fungicides have been restricted, driving the development and application of sustainable alternatives within the framework of integrated plant disease management. Among these, Actinobacteria (also referred to as Actinomycetota) have attracted considerable attention over the past decades due to their versatile metabolites and plant growth-promoting properties, supporting their potential application as bacterial biocontrol agents. Their activity against phytopathogenic fungi is largely associated with direct antagonistic mechanisms. Currently, special attention is paid to the excreted secondary metabolites, lytic enzymes, volatile organic compounds and their in vitro antifungal activity. Therefore, this review summarizes current knowledge on these direct mechanisms, aiming to support the future application of actinobacteria and their metabolites as part of biological plant disease management strategies. Full article

Pre-storage fruit injuries are a major yet often underestimated cause of postharvest losses in apples, particularly during prolonged cold storage. This study evaluated the impact of minor pre-storage injuries on fruit deterioration and assessed the effectiveness of ammonium bicarbonate (2%) and clove bud essential oil (0.2%) as eco-friendly postharvest treatments compared with the fungicide fludioxonil (Scholar). Fresh red and yellow apples were classified as either intact fruit or fruit bearing minor injuries affecting less than 2% of the surface area (approximately 2 mm lesions). Treatments were applied by spraying before storage at 5 °C for six months, followed by 10 days of shelf life at 20 °C. Minor injuries significantly increased postharvest decay, weight loss, and quality deterioration in both cultivars. Injured yellow apples exhibited decay incidence of 17–24% and disease severity of 10.5–17.8%, whereas the more susceptible red apples showed decay incidence of 44.6–60% and disease severity of up to 50%. In contrast, non-injured fruit maintained better physicochemical quality and generally exhibited less than 5% decay incidence. Responses to storage and treatments differed between cultivars. Ammonium bicarbonate effectively reduced decay and helped maintain firmness in yellow apples, providing protection comparable to that of fludioxonil, whereas Scholar was the most effective treatment for reducing decay in red apples. Clove essential oil reduced disease development in non-injured fruit but showed limited effects on firmness preservation. The residual activity of fludioxonil remained detectable after prolonged storage, as demonstrated by inoculation assays performed after storage. The results demonstrate that fruit integrity at harvest is a critical determinant of successful long-term storage and that the benefits of postharvest treatments are substantially reduced when fruit are mechanically injured. Preventive treatment of uninjured fruit with ammonium bicarbonate or Scholar can significantly reduce postharvest losses, while careful handling and sorting to eliminate injured fruit remain essential components of sustainable apple storage management. Full article

Black spot disease caused by Ceratocystis fimbriata (C. fimbriata) is a severe postharvest disease of sweet potatoes. This study evaluated the biocontrol potential of Bacillus velezensis (B. velezensis) L33a against this pathogen. Confrontation assays showed that L33a inhibited mycelial growth by 82.83%. FDA/PI staining and scanning electron microscopy revealed that L33a disrupted cell membrane integrity and caused severe mycelial deformation. Co-culture experiments indicated that L33a altered the expression of key pathogenic genes in C. fimbriata. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from L33a inhibited the pathogen by 77.78%, outperforming cell-free supernatant (CFS). VOCs primarily suppressed spore germination, with phenylethanol (PEA) and octanoic acid achieving 100% inhibition. In planta tests on sweet potato tubers showed that both L33a culture and VOCs significantly reduced lesion expansion. Using qPCR analysis, we found that L33a activated defense-related genes in tissues around wounds, particularly those involved in the jasmonic acid (JA) signaling pathway. In summary, B. velezensis L33a effectively controls sweet potato black rot through multiple mechanisms: direct antifungal activity, inhibition of spore germination, modulation of pathogen gene expression, and induction of host defense responses. It represents a promising natural inhibitor for postharvest disease management. Full article

Proper handling during harvesting and subsequent postharvest management is essential to reduce losses in fruits and vegetables, particularly because these products remain metabolically active after harvest. Physiological processes such as respiration, transpiration, ethylene production, softening, physiological disorders, and postharvest diseases determine quality deterioration, shelf life, and marketability. However, these processes do not affect all commodities in the same way; for example, climacteric fruits are strongly influenced by ethylene during ripening, whereas non-climacteric fruits generally show lower ethylene production and different postharvest behavior. In Mexico, postharvest management is especially relevant because fruit and vegetable producers differ widely in terms of production scale, infrastructure, access to technology, financing capacity, and market destination. Producers with limited access to technology require practical and low-cost alternatives, while more technologically advanced producers may use specialized systems but still experience postharvest losses due to physiological deterioration, handling conditions, logistics, and market constraints. Therefore, this review summarizes the main postharvest physiological processes affecting fruits and vegetables and discusses their implications for knowledge transfer, technology adoption, and sustainability among local producers in Mexico. The review highlights that reducing postharvest losses requires commodity-specific management, continuous technical support, low-cost and locally adaptable technologies, and coordinated participation among researchers, extension personnel, producers, government institutions, industry, and market actors. Strengthening postharvest knowledge transfer to small and local producers is essential to reduce losses, improve marketability, and promote more sustainable fruit and vegetable systems in Mexico. Full article

Fusarium fungi are known to infect table beet (Beta vulgaris subsp. vulgaris) plants at various stages of development worldwide. Fusarium root rot, which develops post-harvest during long-term storage, is of particular economic significance. In Russia, there is no up-to-date information about the species diversity of pathogens causing this disease of table beets, which determined the purpose of this study. A total of 28 Fusarium isolates were collected from affected beet roots grown in the Moscow region of the Russian Federation from 2018 to 2023 years. Molecular phylogeny based on the TEF-1α and RPB2 genes in combination with morphological characterization showed that five Fusarium species were involved in the pathogenesis of Fusarium root rot of table beet during storage: F. acuminatum (43% of the total number of isolates), F. avenaceum, F. campestre (FTSC); F. sporotrichioides (FSAMSC) and F. solani (FSSC). At the same time, the species F. acuminatum, F. campestre, and F. sporotrichioides were first discovered on beet root in the Russian Federation. Temperature sensitivity of the identified species was studied at 5 °C and 25 °C. According to the value of the cold sensitivity index (CTI) on the nutrient medium and native substrate, the isolates were distributed differently: F. campestre (0.32) > F. acuminatum (0.22) > F. avenaceum (0.21) > F. sporotrichioides (0.19) > F. solani (0.20) and F. acuminatum (0.32) > F. campestre (0.21) > F. solani (0.03) > F. avenaceum and F. sporotrichioides (0.01), respectively. This confirms the need to study the pathogenic properties of isolates on a natural substrate (host plant) under different temperature conditions. When infected with the dominant and most aggressive species F. acuminatum, there was a high variation in the size of the affected area, depending on the genotype of the lines, under both temperature conditions (Va = 2–8 mm³ at 5 °C and Va = 31–1760 mm³ at 25 °C). Therefore, this species can be considered to be the most objective differentiating factor in assessing the resistance of table beet roots to fusarium rot, which determines the need to include it in the breeding process for creating resistant varieties and hybrids for the Central region of Russia. The data obtained in this study are of great importance for developing strategies for managing Fusarium fungi associated with Fusarium rot of beet-root during storage. The research results will also be relevant for other vegetable crops that remain fresh for long periods of time or undergo vernalization in the case of seed production at low temperatures. Full article

Durian (Durio zibethinus Murr.), a renowned tropical fruit crop, is increasingly cultivated in the Hainan Province of China. In June 2025, symptoms of postharvest fruit rot were observed on durian fruits from a commercial orchard in Sanya City, Hainan Province, with a disease incidence of approximately 5.2%. Three fungal isolates were obtained and identified as Lasiodiplodia pseudotheobromae and L. lignicola based on morphological characterization and multi-locus phylogenetic analysis (combining ITS, TUB2, and EF1-α gene sequences). Pathogenicity assays confirmed both species as causal agents of durian postharvest rot, with rapid lesion expansion and eight tropical fruit hosts, including banana and mango, posing a threat to postharvest storage. Fungicide sensitivity tests showed imazalil and imazalil sulfate with mean EC₅₀ values of 0.07 µg/mL and 0.08 µg/mL as most effective, followed by prochloraz, iprodione, and prochloraz-Mn. L. lignicola was more sensitive to most fungicides than L. pseudotheobromae. These findings underscore the need for species-specific fungicide strategies in disease management. This is the first report of L. pseudotheobromae and L. lignicola causing durian postharvest rot in this preliminary study from Hainan. With Hainan emerging as a key production region, further research is essential to develop effective control measures against this economically significant disease. Full article

An eco-friendly microemulsion biofungicide derived from Allamanda cathartica was developed for the control of papaya anthracnose caused by Colletotrichum gloeosporioides. The formulation was prepared by blending surfactants, carrier oil, and water and optimized using ternary phase diagrams to identify stable microemulsion systems. All selected formulations exhibited surface tension values ranging from 29 to 31 mN/m, while particle sizes ranged from 51.79 to 1801.05 nm. The optimized formulation, coded as AM8, consisted of 35% Allamanda concentrated liquid crude extract (ACLCE), 26% water, 13% alkyl polyglucoside surfactant, and 26% dimethylamide oil. Papaya fruits coated with the formulations showed significant reductions (p < 0.05) in anthracnose incidence caused by C. gloeosporioides. Control fruits treated with water showed 75% disease incidence, whereas fruits treated with benomyl showed 42% disease incidence. Disease incidence, severity, and disease index decreased with increasing formulation concentration, and fruits treated with the eight formulations at 10% concentration exhibited significantly lower disease incidence (0–17%) and disease index (0–17%), with disease severity consistently scored as zero. The Allamanda formulation demonstrated strong antifungal activity with EC₅₀ and EC₉₅ values of 1.839 and 7.067 mg/mL (w/v), respectively, at the 95% confidence level. The optimized formulation AM8 remained stable for up to one year and showed superior disease control performance compared with the conventional fungicide benomyl. In addition, the formulation maintained fruit quality by preserving firmness, peel color, and soluble solids concentration, thereby extending papaya shelf life up to 30 days without adversely affecting the natural ripening process. These findings demonstrate the potential of Allamanda-based microemulsion formulations as sustainable biofungicides for postharvest control of papaya anthracnose and provide a promising alternative to conventional synthetic fungicides. Full article

Postharvest losses of fruits and vegetables are a global problem that directly affect food security, the economy, and the environment. These losses are mainly associated with fungal diseases during storage. Due to the limitations of synthetic fungicides, including the development of resistance and risks to human health, there is growing interest in sustainable disease control strategies. This scoping review analyzes the potential of the yeast Metschnikowia pulcherrima as a biocontrol agent for postharvest phytopathogens, based on the scientific literature published between 2014 and 2026. The reviewed studies identify several antagonistic mechanisms, including competition for nutrients and space, the production of organic volatile compounds, hydrolytic enzyme activity, biofilm formation, and the induction of resistance in fruits. In vitro and in vivo assays show that M. pulcherrima effectively reduces postharvest disease incidence and severity caused by certain fungi. Furthermore, its synergistic effect when combined with emerging technologies is notable. The results highlight its potential as a sustainable alternative to synthetic fungicides, although further studies are needed for large-scale commercial application. Full article

Species of Penicillium are among the most important fungal pathogens responsible for postharvest diseases of agricultural crops worldwide. This review provides an overview of five economically important Penicillium spp., namely P. expansum, P. digitatum, P. italicum, P. citrinum, and P. oxalicum. Emphasis is placed on P. expansum, P. digitatum, and P. italicum which are the main causal agents of blue mold and green mold rots in pome fruits and citrus, commodities that dominate global fresh produce trade and long-term storage. While studies on plant-pathogenic Penicillium are mainly focused on these hosts, this review highlights reports of infections in other crops across diverse geographic regions, highlighting the broader host range of these species. The main aspects highlighted include host specificity and diversity, production of mycotoxins and other secondary metabolites, current management and control strategies, and the potential influence of climate change on disease incidence and severity. Understanding the biology and epidemiology of plant-pathogenic Penicillium species is essential, as several species are both pathogens and producers of mycotoxins, leading to quality deterioration and nutrient depletion resulting in economic losses. Full article