**7. Conclusion and perspectives**

The importance of Si and Si fertilization for improving plant health are recognized. Several studies clearly demonstrate that silicate fertilization for wheat plants increases grain yield and its quality, especially under both biotic and abiotic stress. In the case of biotic stress, the Si effect reduces the intensity of the diseases due to the enhancement of the defense mechanisms that are earlier expressed and better coordinated. In addition to the effect on defenses against the pathogen, plants supplied with Si also show less physiological damage, in fact this is associated with increased on the yield. These effects are clearly evident and largely accepted, indicating that Si fertilization could be incorporated in the wheat management.

Nevertheless, for silicate fertilization to become widely used by wheat growers, several issues still need to be clarified. Initially, an important point is that most of the studies demonstrating the effect of Si on disease control and the reduction of physiological damage was carried out in a controlled environment with only a single stress imposed on the plant, and few studies were carried out in field conditions with multiple stresses simultaneously. Therefore, more studies need to be carried out under field conditions to obtain a greater amount of data of the silicate fertilization effect and with all these data should be analyzed through meta-analyzes to provide a holistic view of the effect.

Taking into account that we can mostly use two forms of Si application: leaf or root, there are still many unanswered questions. For example, in soil fertilization we can consider the following questions.

1.What is the best form of application? In this sense, we can consider situations in which the farmer plows the soil and the silicate fertilizer can be incorporated during this procedure. However, for wheat growers who use no-till, incorporation is not possible. In this case, the application of the Si source can be carried out on the soil surface or in the sowing line. For application to the surface without incorporation, we still do not know clearly how long it takes for Si to be available in the soil solution in sufficient quantity to meet the demand of the wheat plant. With respect to the application in the sowing line, there is still not enough data to indicate which is the best source or dose of Si to supply to the plant without interfering in the initial stages of seedling development, and also is still unknown which is the amount to applied without compromising the logistic yield of the sowing procedure to obtain the Si benefits as well as possible. *Silicon Use in the Integrated Disease Management of Wheat: Current Knowledge DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95285*


Further research should be done to answer these questions, even though we will be closer to being able to clearly demonstrate to wheat growers the real benefit, in economic terms, and the routinely adopt silicate fertilization for wheat crop.
