NEW ACQUISITIONS ON THE BIOCONTROL OF FUSARIUM HEAD BLIGHT: FROM ECOLOGY TO CRISPR-CAS GENOME EDITING

Since the first promising results obtained by the use of the two beneficial isolates Trichoderma gamsii T6085 and Fusarium oxysporum 7121 against Fusarium graminearum, the mechanisms involved in this multitrophic approach for the biocontrol of Fusarium Head Blight (FHB) on wheat have been further investigated. Applications of one or more biocontrol agents during the two critical phases of the disease (crop residues and spikes at anthesis) could result in a good disease control, due to exploitative and interference competition mechanisms potentially used by beneficial organisms to control FHB causal agents and to reduce the risks connected with mycotoxin contamination. In order to investigate the ecology of T. gamsii T6085 and F. oxysporum 7121, the two antagonists and the pathogen have been used as inoculants of two different natural substrates, wheat and rice, thus resulting in a significant reduction of F. graminearum growth and trichothecenes production. The three isolates have been also inoculated on wheat straw: both T. gamsii and F. oxysporum significantly reduced F. graminearum growth and perithecia production on cultural debris. A tool to study fungal behaviour in depth is actually provided by the CRISPR-Cas technique, a genome editing approach with enormous potentiality to be used in biocontrol and crop pathology studies. Recently, CRISPRCas9 has been applied to the isolates here described to edit genes putatively involved in plant/pathogen and antagonist/pathogen interaction in order to further investigate aspects connected with the biocontrol of FHB.