Review of Essential Oils as Antifungal Agents for Plant Fungal Diseases

Fungi cause huge yield losses due to their ability to cause serious devastating diseases to the crops. minimizing their effect on the crops need to get a promising way of controlling them. therefore, the use of essential oils could be a good option to tackle the challenge of fungal diseases. essential oils are natural products that are extracted from plants by different methods. they have been used for a long history of time for different purposes. nowadays there is a huge interest to use them as plant protection product to be alternative for chemicals like fungicides. the main reasons for choosing them are their antimicrobial activity and their environmental friendly. as we observed from the antifungal trials in different literature, the essential oils have a great antifungal effect on many plant pathogens and inhibited most of the tested plant pathogens in the laboratory. thus, essential oils could be a control agent for plant fungal diseases and further investigation is required to use in the field.