Introduction

Background

Most of disease of agriculture crops is caused by plant pathogenic fungi. Some of these fungal disease cause total losses to farmer such as potato late blight disease that occurred in Ireland in 1845 which was caused by oomycete Phytophthora infestans (Schumann,2000). 

oomycete Phytophthora infestans

Potato Late Blight clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbagIqYBijs&feature=youtu.be

Other common fungi that always cause diseases in plants are Ganoderma boninense, Pyricularia oryzae, Fusarium sp, Exserohilum rostratum, and Rhizoctonia solani which cause basal stem rot of oil palm, rice blast, root and stem rot, leaf spot and sheath blight of rice.

Pyricularia oryzae

Fusarium sp

Exserohilum rostratum

The most effective and common way used to inhibit fungi or a fungal spore is using chemical fungicides. Farmers are likely to choose chemical fungicides to protect their crops from fungal diseases because of faster effect, easy to get and cheaper compare to other method of crop protection.

Synthetic fungicides were shown to have undesirable attributes such as high and acute toxicity, long degradation period, accumulation in food chain and an extension of their power to destroy both useful organisms and harmful pests.
(Jaysinghe et.al, 2013).

This shows that the use of chemical fungicides is not good and can cause long term effects. Moreover, using chemical fungicides towards plant in long time can cause plant pathogens to develop resistance and it will be more difficult to fight the diseases. 

Even though, using chemical fungicides can give faster result but it is not encouraged as it will bring more negative effects in the future.

Antimicrobial compounds that are found in plant extracts are known to have the abilities to inhibit fungal growth. Extracts of plants have potential use to treat diseases caused by plant pathogenic fungi because of their antimicrobial properties. (Jaysinghe et. al, 2013).

Secondary metabolites such as phenols, flavonoids and phenolic glycosides are produced abundantly in plants and many of them contain antifungal activities.

Ficus deltoidea, commonly known as 'Mas cotek' is an herbal plant that is native in Southeast Asia (Shafaei et. al, 2015) .It is known that leaf extracts of F. Deltoidea have the presence of primary and secondary metabolites such as polyphenols, amino acids and flavonoids. (Shafaei et. al, 2015). 

The objective of the study

The general objective of the study was to determine the potential of Ficus Deltoidea leaf extract as an alternative to chemical fungicide for the control of plant pathogenic fungi. 

The specific objectives of the study were: 

• To extract antimicrobial compounds from the leaves of Ficus deltoidea

• To determine the effect of the extracted antimicrobial compounds on the mycelial growth and spore germination of selected fungal pathogens in vitro

The hypothesis in the study

The hypotheses of this research were: 

Ho:
The leaf extract will not give effects on the mycelial growth and spore germination of selected plant fungal pathogens.

Ha:
The leaf extract will give effects on the mycelial growth and spore germination of selected plant fungal pathogens.