Designing sunflower for biotic stress resilience: everlasting challenge

Sunflower, a relevant crop for oil production in temperature regions, is subjected to various biotic stresses. Significance of a particular stress agent, both spatially and temporally, is determined by the environmental limitations and the pest population variability. This chapter provides a review of the major sunflower diseases and pests, with an emphasis on their distribution and description of the damage they may cause. Besides, we discuss different strategies used in sunflower breeding for biotic stress resistance, strategy that is reliable, durable, cost effective and with low negative impact on environment, for pest and disease control. During a long history of sunflower cultivation, several major breakthroughs in breeding for resistance to diseases and pests were made. Recent breakthrough in sunflower genomics and availability of genome data of both sunflower and its pathogens opens up the new possibilities for introduction of biotic stress resistance into cultivated sunflower. In the light of changes made over the history and the recent findings we discuss new tools available for designing sunflower crop resilient to biotic stresses.