Abstract
One of the most important postharvest disease of peaches is brown rot caused by different species of the fungus Monilinia. Anamorphs dominate as inoculum sources especially in the Mediterranean areas of Europe, where brown rot in peaches is caused by M. laxa and M. fructigena. A third species, M. fructicola causes brown rot in other parts of the world and is included in the A2 list of quarantine organisms for Europe (organisms present in the EPPO region, but contained, under official control) because its broad dissemination in Europe would be devastating especially for peach and nectarine. These fungi overwinter and produce mycelium in fruit mummies and infected wood. This produces conidia under favorable conditions or from stromata that produce ascospores in the case of M. fructicola. Fruit infection by conidia of Monilinia spp. can occur secondarily from any infected tissue in which the moisture content is sufficient for sporulation. When the microclimate is unfavorable, infections may remain latent until conditions favor disease expression, which finally leads to fruit rot. Correlation between the incidence of rotting and latent infection caused by Monilinia spp. has been reported. Management of orchards focused to decrease postharvest brown rot will be treated here. Detection and identification methods, inoculum sources, and epidemiological factors affecting latent fruit infections and postharvest brown rot will be described, together with the models available to predict disease risk. Different integrated control strategies are presented.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Usall, Dr. Torres, N. Lamarca, and M. Mari for collaboration in experiments. This work was supported by projects AGL2002-4396-CO2, RTA2005-00077-CO2 from the Ministry of Science and Innovation (Spain), and QoL-PL-1999-01065 from the European Commission. We thank X. O. de Eribe and growers for their support and collaboration.
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Melgarejo, P., De Cal, A., Larena, I., Gell, I., Guijarro, B. (2009). The Peach Story. In: Prusky, D., Gullino, M. (eds) Postharvest Pathology. Plant Pathology in the 21st Century, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8930-5_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8930-5_14
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