Fungicides are substances used for controlling growth of pathogenic fungi, which are the major cause for crop lost. With increased use of pesticides in the global food production, there is a major side effect, as many fungicides are harmful for health and environment. In the recent years a great attempt was made to find natural products for controlling plant diseases. Our research focused on the study of potential fungicidal properties of hemp extracts. We have prepared hemp extracts with three different solvents and plated them on the media on which we inoculated potentially phytopathogenic fungi (Fusarium oxysporum, Botrytis sp., Verticillium nonalfalfae). We measured the growth of fungi, analyzed hemp extracts and analyzed the fungal mycelium with the lipid peroxidation method and the FTIR method. The highest concentration of cannabinoids was found in ethanolic and oil extracts, the most concentrated were cannabidiolic acid and cannabidiol, while in aqueous extracts we detected only one cannabinoid. Ethanol extracts inhibited fungal growth the most, and the highest growth inhibition was measured in fungi Botrytis sp., where the inhibition was above 70% on the bud extracts. All three fungi grown on ethanolic extracts revealed, that the concentration of cannabidiol correlated negatively with the surface of the fungus growth. The lipid peroxidation method did not prove to be suitable for measuring the fungal stress response to the cannabinoids. However, with the FTIR method, we confirmed that hemp extracts influence the biomolecular profile of fungi, as some molecules were up- and others down-expressed. With the discriminant analysis of fungal growth surface and FTIR spectra we found significant differences between fungi treatments. Based on our results, we can conclude that hemp ethanol extracts have good potential to be used as a natural agent for the controlling fungal diseases on plants.
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