Description

This book brings together various topics concerning the diseases of
harvested fruits and vegetables. A considerable part of the material on
which this book is based has been gathered from my lectures given to
students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, at the Faculty of
Agriculture in Rehovot. The material has generally been based on
original articles and reviews written by scientists from all over the world.
Throughout the book I have tried to impart to the reader an awareness
of the great variety of research that has been constantly done in the field
of postharvest pathology. Among the studies done in the field, some
research has made a significant and exciting contribution to the
understanding of the inter-relationships between the pathogen and the
harvested fruits or vegetables. Throughout the years, with the
advancement in this research, the challenge to integrate the ultimate
aim - the lengthening of the postharvest life of fruits and vegetables -
with an understanding of the biochemical processes that enable us to do
just that, has become most prominent.
Although each chapter in the book constitutes a separate unit, the
order and continuity of the chapters are relevant to a better
understanding of the whole subject.
The first four chapters describe the causal agents of postharvest
diseases of fruits and vegetables, their sources and their ways of
penetration into the host, factors that may accelerate the development of
the pathogen in the host - and those that suppress them. A list of the
main pathogens of fruits and vegetables, their hosts and the diseases
elicited by them are given in a separate chapter, while a detailed
description of the major diseases of selected groups of fruits - subtropical
and tropical fruits, pome and stone fruits, soft fruits and berries, and
solanaceous vegetable fruits - is given at the end of the book, in the
Summary of Postharvest Diseases of Four Groups of Fruits.
Chapters five and six focus on the attack mechanisms that the pathogen
may use to invade the plant tissues and develop within them, and the
defense mechanisms with which the host is equipped to stop invaders or to
suppress their development. Physiological and biochemical changes
following infection are described in Chapter seven. The following chapters,
8 to 12, all deal with treatments aimed at suppressing postharvest diseases.
While chapter 8 describes treatments for maintaining the natural resistance of the young fruit or vegetable, chapters 9, 10 and 11 describe
chemical, physical and biological means for preventing disease initiation,
inhibiting its development or reducing its severity. Increased official and
public concern about the chemical residues left on the fresh produce and
the resistance some pathogens have developed toward major fungicides
have stimulated the search for alternative technologies for postharvest
disease control. This section emphasizes the search for natural and safe
chemical compounds, and the variety of alternative physical and biological
control methods. It also points to the possibility of exploiting the natural
defensive substances of fruits and vegetables, both constitutive and
induced, to enhance host resistance during storage. This leads us to the
last chapter, which introduces new approaches to the prevention of
postharvest diseases, by inducing the natural host resistance by means of
chemical, physical and biological elicitors. At present, with the
developments in molecular genetics, we are standing at the dawn of a new
era in which genetic crop modification may be of central importance
among the variety of methods used to increase host resistance against
postharvest diseases. Approaches to enhancing fruit resistance by creating
disease-resistant transgenic plants have been discussed.
This book is intended for teachers and students who focus on
postharvest pathology and plant pathology programs, for scientists in
research institut