Botanical Pesticides in the Management of Postharvest Fruit Diseases

This book deals with the screening of some plant extracts and essential oils against a most common citrus blue mould rot pathogen and presents the findings of research work and the future prospect of essential oils of Mentha arvensis, Ocimum canum and Zingiber officinale in control of citrus fruits by protecting them from fungal rotting. The aqueous extract of A nilotica and Kaempferol isolated from the bark of A nilotica have also shown the potential to protect the citrus fruits. The active principle were standardized through IR, NMR and Mass spectroscopic methods. The essential oils have been found to be non-mammalian toxic in nature by pharmacological evaluation. The book is divided into five Chapters. Chapter One is introduction, introduces the importance of the problem. Chapter Two is Review of Literature which is the review of the earlier work done on some natural plant products. Chapter Three is Material, Methods and Results in which all the techniques used during the course of research are mentioned and results are presented. Chapter Four presents the conclusions and discussion which are derived from the work. Chapter Five is Summary in which the entire work has been summarized. The book will be useful to plant pathologists, Microbiologists, Agriculturists and Horticulturists, Botanists and general public. Recent information’s on antifungal plant products have been presented in the book which would be beneficial to the students working on botanical pesticides.