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Abiotic and biotic stresses, such as mineral nutrition deficiency (especially nitrogen) and Fusarium attack, pose a global threat with devastating impact on wheat yield and quality losses worldwide. This preliminary study aimed to determine the effect of Fusarium inoculation and two different nitrogen levels on oxidative status and antioxidative response in nine wheat varieties. Level of lipid peroxidation, activities of antioxidant enzymes (catalase, ascorbate peroxidase, glutathione reductase), phenolics, and chloroplast pigments content were measured. In general, wheat variety, nitrogen, and Fusarium treatment had an impact on all tested parameters. The most significant effect had a low nitrogen level itself, which mostly decreased activities of all antioxidant enzymes and reduced the chloroplast pigment content. At low nitrogen level, Fusarium treatment increased activities of some antioxidative enzymes, while in a condition of high nitrogen levels, antioxidative enzyme activities were mostly decreased due to Fusarium treatment. The obtained results provided a better understanding on wheat defense mechanisms against F. culmorum, under different nitrogen treatments and can serve as an additional tool in assessing wheat tolerance to various environmental stress conditions.

Background: Extensive and growing use of different chemical pesticides that affect both the environment and human health raises a need for new and more suitable methods to deal with plant pathogens. Nanotechnology has enabled the use of materials at the nanoscale with exceptional functionality in different economic domains including agricultural production. This study aimed to evaluate antifungal potential of selenium nanoparticles (SeNPs) and silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) stabilized with different surface coatings and characterized by different surface charge on plant pathogenic fungi Macrophomina phaseolina, Sclerotinia sclerotiorum and Diaporthe longicolla., Results: AgNPs were coated with three different stabilizing agents: mono citrate (MC-AgNPs), cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB-AgNPs) and polyvinylpyrrolidon (PVP-AgNPs). SeNPs were coated with poly-l-lysine (PLL-SeNPs), polyacrylic acid (PAA-SeNPs), and polyvinylpyrrolidon (PVP-SeNPs). Seven different concentrations (0.1, 0.5, 1, 5, 10, 50 and 100 mg L -1 ) of nanoparticles were applied. All AgNPs and SeNPs significantly inhibited the growth of the tested fungi. Among the tested NPs, PVP-AgNPs showed the best inhibitory effect on the tested plant pathogenic fungi, especially against S. sclerotiorum. The similar inhibition of the sclerotia formation was observed for S. sclerotiorum treated with PLL-SeNPs., Conclusion: Obtained results provides new insights on fungicide effect of AgNPs and SeNPs stabilized with different coating agents on different plant pathogens. Further work should focus on detailed risk/benefit ratio assessment of using SeNPs or AgNPs in agriculture taking into account whole agroecosystem. © 2020 Society of Chemical Industry., (© 2020 Society of Chemical Industry.)

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of 23 different synthesized ionic liquids (ILs) on Fusarium culmorum and Fusarium oxysporum growth rate. The strategy of IL synthesis was a structural modification of ionic liquids through changing the polarity of imidazolium and pycolinium cations and replacing halide anions with well known antifungal anions (cinnamate, caffeate and mandelate). The findings clearly suggest that the type of alkyl chain on the cation is the most determining factor for IL toxicity. In order to examine how IL structure affects their toxicity towards Fusarium genus, lipophilic descriptor A  log  P is calculated from density functional theory and correlated with Fusarium growth rate. All these results demonstrate the high level of the interdependency of lipophilicity and toxicity for investigated ILs towards the Fusarium genus. The data collected in this research suggest that the inhibitory influence of ILs is more pronounced in the case of F. oxysporum ., Competing Interests: Authors have no any conflict of interest to declare., (This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry.)