Plant viral diseases in Egypt and their control

Plant viruses pose a serious threat to agricultural production and incur enormous costs to growers each year, both directly, in the form of yield and quality loss, and indirectly, in the forms of time and funds spent on scouting and disease management. Virus diseases cause plants crops losses annually in average of US$ 60 billion. Accordingly, viral diseases need to be controlled for the sustainable agriculture and in order to maintain the quality and abundance of food production. Moreover, recently agriculture suffered from different problems such as, the contentious changes in climatic factors globally, increasing the numbers of pathogens per year and appearance of anew pests. Unfortunately, chemical control has negative impact on the environment and on human health as well in addition it creates an imbalance in the microbial biodiversity, which may be unfavorable to the activity of the beneficial organisms and may lead to the development of pathogens-resistant strains. The most important thing is that agricultural sustainability should be supported by ecofriendly approaches such as discovery of newbiocontrol agents capable to control the plant viral diseases. To achieve this was inevitable to use the plant growth-promoting microbes as effective biocontrol agents against plant viruses will hold the greatest promise and is considered a pillar of integrated viral diseases management.We argue that the use of growth-promoting microbes will preserve sustainable agriculture as well as a clean environment free from pollution, which will be benefiting for both the farmer and the consumer. So far, there are no such pesticides at the local level, while at the international level there may be one or two products. We succeeded to control some viruses infect potato by using the filtrates of seven Bacillus spp. mixed with nanoclay, but the product is still under research and development.