IDENTIFICATION OF A PEPTIDE WITH SPECIFIC ACTIVITY AGAINST FUNGI THAT CAUSE POSTHARVEST DECAY IN FRUITS

Postharvest decay of fruits and vegetables is mostly controlled by chemical fungicides. However, growing public health and environmental concerns have resulted in the de-registration of some fungicides and have driven the search for alternative disease management strategies and/or safer antifungal agents, which could substitute currently used chemicals.

Our groups are interested in the utilization of combinatorial peptide libraries to identify short peptides with specific activity against postharvest pathogens. In this work, a hexapeptide of defined amino acid sequence was demonstrated to have antifungal activity against selected phytopathogenic fungi that cause postharvest decay in fruits.