Mechanism‑Based Management of Quality and Disease Resistance in Plant Foods Across Pre‑ and Post‑Harvest Strategies for Quality Retention and Value Addition

Dear Colleagues,

Plant foods are pillars of global food security and human nutrition, yet quality deterioration and pathogen‑induced decay, occurring from preharvest growth through postharvest storage and distribution, remain persistent challenges that cause massive food losses, economic waste, and food safety risks worldwide, while postharvest losses also severely undermine the processing potential and overall economic value of plant‑based raw materials. Conventional preservation and disease management strategies, largely empirical in nature, often suffer from limited precision, unstable efficacy, and poor sustainability, mainly due to an insufficient understanding of the intrinsic biological mechanisms that govern quality traits and host defense capacity across the pre‑ and post‑harvest continuum.

This Special Issue aims to advance mechanism‑oriented management of quality attributes and disease resistance throughout the entire production and supply chain. We invite cutting‑edge original research and critical reviews that decipher the physiological, biochemical, molecular, and metabolic mechanisms underlying preharvest quality formation, postharvest senescence and degradation, as well as the dynamic interactions between host tissues and postharvest pathogens. Particular emphasis is placed on, but not limited to, the following areas:

The regulatory effects of preharvest agronomic practices, environmental stimuli, and abiotic stresses on postharvest quality performance and inherent disease resistance;

The action modes of innovative intervention technologies, including physical treatments, biological control agents, GRAS chemical elicitors, and precision breeding strategies, and their implications for processing quality and value‑added utilization of plant foods.

By bridging fundamental mechanistic discoveries with industrial management practices, this Special Issue seeks to provide a solid scientific basis for developing precise, eco‑friendly, and sustainable solutions to minimize postharvest losses.

Dr. Yanpei Chen
Prof. Dr. Zisheng Luo
Guest Editors

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