Engineering of PVA/PVP Hydrogels for Agricultural Applications

Hydrogels have gained significant popularity in agricultural applications in terms of minimizing waste and mitigating the negative environmental impact of agrochemicals. This review specifically examines the utilization of environmentally friendly, shapable hydrogels composed of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) in various casings for crop protection against different pests, fertilizing, and watering. To activate their effectiveness, PVA/PVP hydrogels were loaded with both hydrophilic and hydrophobic environmentally friendly pesticides, namely hydrogen peroxide (HP), the essential oil thymol, and urea as a fertilizer, either separately or in combination. This review covers various physical and chemical approaches used for loading, shaping, and controlling the release profiles of pesticides and fertilizers. Additionally, it explores the evaluation of the chemical composition, structure, classification, rheology, and morphology of the hydrogels as well as their impact on the thermal stability of the encapsulated pesticides and fertilizer, followed by biological tests. These hydrogels significantly contribute to the stabilization and controlled release of essential nutrients and biocides for plants, while maintaining excellent biocidal and fertilizing properties as well as sustainability characteristics. By shedding light on the latest insights into the concepts, applications, and results of these hydrogels, this review demonstrates their immense potential for widespread future use in agriculture.

Bacillus amyloliquefaciens: Harnessing Its Potential for Industrial, Medical, and Agricultural Applications-A Comprehensive Review

Bacillus amyloliquefaciens, a Gram-positive bacterium, has emerged as a versatile microorganism with significant applications in various fields, including industry, medicine, and agriculture. This comprehensive review aims to provide an in-depth understanding of the characteristics, genetic tools, and metabolic capabilities of B. amyloliquefaciens, while highlighting its potential as a chassis cell for synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, and protein expression. We discuss the bacterium's role in the production of chemicals, enzymes, and other industrial bioproducts, as well as its applications in medicine, such as combating infectious diseases and promoting gut health. In agriculture, B. amyloliquefaciens has demonstrated potential as a biofertilizer, biocontrol agent, and stress tolerance enhancer for various crops. Despite its numerous promising applications, B. amyloliquefaciens remains less studied than its Gram-negative counterpart, Escherichia coli. This review emphasizes the need for further research and development of advanced engineering techniques and genetic editing technologies tailored for B. amyloliquefaciens, ultimately unlocking its full potential in scientific and industrial contexts.

The emerging frontier of plant immunity's core hubs

The ever-growing world population, increasingly frequent extreme weather events and conditions, emergence of novel devastating crop pathogens and the social strive for quality food products represent a huge challenge for current and future agricultural production systems. To address these challenges and find realistic solutions, it is becoming more important by the day to understand the complex interactions between plants and the environment, mainly the associated organisms, but in particular pathogens. In the past several years, research in the fields of plant pathology and plant-microbe interactions has enabled tremendous progress in understanding how certain receptor-based plant innate immune systems function to successfully prevent infections and diseases. In this review, we highlight and discuss some of these new ground-breaking discoveries and point out strategies of how pathogens counteract the function of important core convergence hubs of the plant immune system. For practical reasons, we specifically place emphasis on potential applications that can be detracted by such discoveries and what challenges the future of agriculture has to face, but also how these challenges could be tackled.

Mushroom Detection and Three Dimensional Pose Estimation from Multi-View Point Clouds

Agricultural robotics is an up and coming field which deals with the development of robotic systems able to tackle a multitude of agricultural tasks efficiently. The case of interest, in this work, is mushroom collection in industrial mushroom farms. Developing such a robot, able to select and out-root a mushroom, requires delicate actions that can only be conducted if a well-performing perception module exists. Specifically, one should accurately detect the 3D pose of a mushroom in order to facilitate the smooth operation of the robotic system. In this work, we develop a vision module for 3D pose estimation of mushrooms from multi-view point clouds using multiple RealSense active-stereo cameras. The main challenge is the lack of annotation data, since 3D annotation is practically infeasible on a large scale. To address this, we developed a novel pipeline for mushroom instance segmentation and template matching, where a 3D model of a mushroom is the only data available. We evaluated, quantitatively, our approach over a synthetic dataset of mushroom scenes, and we, further, validated, qualitatively, the effectiveness of our method over a set of real data, collected by different vision settings.

Plant Development and Crop Yield: The Role of Gibberellins

Gibberellins have been classically related to a few key developmental processes, thus being essential for the accurate unfolding of plant genetic programs. After more than a century of research, over one hundred different gibberellins have been described. There is a continuously increasing interest in gibberellins research because of their relevant role in the so-called "Green Revolution", as well as their current and possible applications in crop improvement. The functions attributed to gibberellins have been traditionally restricted to the regulation of plant stature, seed germination, and flowering. Nonetheless, research in the last years has shown that these functions extend to many other relevant processes. In this review, the current knowledge on gibberellins homeostasis and mode of action is briefly outlined, while specific attention is focused on the many different responses in which gibberellins take part. Thus, those genes and proteins identified as being involved in the regulation of gibberellin responses in model and non-model species are highlighted. The present review aims to provide a comprehensive picture of the state-of-the-art perception of gibberellins molecular biology and its effects on plant development. This picture might be helpful to enhance our current understanding of gibberellins biology and provide the know-how for the development of more accurate research and breeding programs.

The Versatility in the Applications of Dithiocarbamates

Dithiocarbamate ligands have the ability to form stable complexes with transition metals, and this chelating ability has been utilized in numerous applications. The complexes have also been used to synthesize other useful compounds. Here, the up-to-date applications of dithiocarbamate ligands and complexes are extensively discussed. Some of these are their use as enzyme inhibitor and treatment of HIV and other diseases. The application as anticancer, antimicrobial, medical imaging and anti-inflammatory agents is examined. Moreover, the application in the industry as vulcanization accelerator, froth flotation collector, antifouling, coatings, lubricant additives and sensors is discussed. The various ways in which they have been employed in synthesis of other compounds are highlighted. Finally, the agricultural uses and remediation of heavy metals via dithiocarbamate compounds are comprehensively discussed.

Molecular Mechanisms of Autophagy Regulation in Plants and Their Applications in Agriculture

Autophagy is a highly conserved cellular process for the degradation and recycling of unnecessary cytoplasmic components in eukaryotes. Various studies have shown that autophagy plays a crucial role in plant growth, productivity, and survival. The extensive functions of plant autophagy have been revealed in numerous frontier studies, particularly those regarding growth adjustment, stress tolerance, the identification of related genes, and the involvement of metabolic pathways. However, elucidation of the molecular regulation of plant autophagy, particularly the upstream signaling elements, is still lagging. In this review, we summarize recent progress in research on the molecular mechanisms of autophagy regulation, including the roles of protein kinases, phytohormones, second messengers, and transcriptional and epigenetic control, as well as the relationship between autophagy and the 26S proteasome in model plants and crop species. We also discuss future research directions for the potential application of autophagy in agriculture.