Control of Fusarium wilt of tomato in the greenhouse using silver nanofungicides

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is considered as one of the most economically important vegetable crops in the world. Its production is about 130 million tons, of which 88 million are specified for the fresh markets whereas, 42 million are processed (Anonymous, 2016). Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. lycopersici causes a highly destructive vascular wilt disease of tomato leading to significant crop losses in the field and in protected tomatoes, thus remains as one of the main limiting factors for production of this crop (McGovern, 2015).
       Control  of  infectious  plant  diseases  is  the  most  important concern  of  crop  production.  However, resistance  of phytopathogenic fungi to  synthetic fungicides  must be considered.  According  to  Bouwmeester et al., (2009),  the use  of  new  mechanisms for  plant disease  control  is  basically  required, however,  recent  development  of nanopesticides  can  help  to  control  many  plant  diseases.  Sekhon, (2014); Ahmed and Lee, (2015) later added that  the  use  of  nanoparticles (NP)  is considered as a promising alternative way to control phytopathogens. In a previous study, Jo et al., (2009), explained that multiple mechanisms of actions of these NP targeting mainly on several biological pathways  in  microbial cells,  provide  a  novel  solution  for avoiding development of pathogen resistance that was observed on using chemical control of most plant diseases. Application of silver and gold NP  in particular elicited beneficial results on different crop plants with low and/or no phytotoxicity (Muthuramalingam et al., 2015).