A review of the interaction between potassium nutrition and plant disease control

Abstract

Potassium (K) is an essential macronutrient involved in many physiological and biochemical functions that affect a plant's susceptibility to disease. These processes include stomatal regulation, enzyme activation, and solute transport, each of which is often discussed through the lens of either plant nutrition or plant disease control. However, the interaction between these stresses and the resulting physiological and agronomic impact is an important consideration when managing a cropping system as a whole and is scarcely addressed in the literature. Therefore, a review of the literature was focused on the interaction of K nutrition and the resulting impact on plant disease control. Nutrient management, especially K, can manipulate these essential plant processes to provide the host plant with either an advantage or disadvantage in disease susceptibility, depending on the pathogen and the situation. Numerous studies have been conducted investigating the individual pathogen and host relationships, concluding that the majority of bacterial and fungal diseases decreased with increasing K nutrition, while viral diseases and nematode infections had inconsistent responses to K nutrition. These differences in the response of disease to K nutrition complicate generalizations across species and environments. Similarly, the impact of K on plant growth is affected by the concentration of each nutrient and its ratio with other nutrients. Therefore, a review of the major physiological processes that depend on plant K nutrition is discussed below with the resulting impact on plant disease control.