Portuguese propolis: A potential source of environmentally friendly biofungicides

• Author(s): Passão, C. ; Rodrigues, C. ; Almeida Aguiar, Cristina ; Cunha, A.
• Date: 2018
• Persistent ID: https://hdl.handle.net/1822/73218
• Origin: RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
• Document Type: Other
• Language: English
• Contributor(s): Universidade do Minho

Description

[Excerpt] The need to increase food production to feed an increasingly growing world population has led to an intensive use of pesticides. Globally, 4.6 million tons of chemical pesticides are sprayed into the environment every year1 . Out of the total consumption of pesticides, 17.5% are in the form of fungicides. However, pesticides have undesirable characteristics, such as the development of pathogen resistance and long degradation periods, and negative impacts on the environment, like soil and water pollution, bioaccumulation in the food chain, toxicity to non-target organisms and public health problems2 . Therefore, new environmentally friendly natural products, which are effective, safe, biodegradable and leave no harmful residues are needed. [...]