About

The rationale of the PHEALING project is that plant healing represents an important genetic potential to reduce post-harvest losses with limited reliance on storage facilities that are costly and energy consuming. The use of natural plant healing mechanisms and microbial antagonists have the potential to lead to methods that can be applied across a wide range of varieties preferred by growers, consumers and industries.
We hypothesise that plant healing could expand to most crops and therefore the project builds on the selection of three crop species that can be considered as model because of for their consumed organs fruit (tomato), tuber (potato) and storage root (cassava) and their reported high levels of post-harvest losses.

The specific objectives of the project are to:

• Study and characterise plant healing mechanisms in model crop species;
• Identify conditions conducive for plant healing in order to start exploitation of this natural process;
• Identify and characterise genetic diversity for plant healing in the selected crop species to help tapping in this yet unexplored genetic potential;
• Test novel biocontrol approaches including bacteriophages and priming molecules to induce plant healing and to reduce post-harvest losses.