ADvanced SOILs for the agritech R&D

AdSoils project aims to evaluate, validate, and develop artificial advanced soil technology for its commercial exploitation as a tool forscreening crops from belowground.As part of the Farm to Fork strategy, the European Commission aims at reduced “nutrient losses of at least 50% by 2030, whileensuring no deterioration in soil fertility.

This is expected to lead to a reduction in fertiliser use of at least 20%”.

The breeding andagrochemical sectors are now seeking ways for crops to acquire water and nutrient more efficiently, supplying seeds, compounds andinoculum that reduce soil contamination and make crops more resilient to climate change.

Assessing the effectiveness of suchstrategies is a major bottleneck because current screening technologies are destructive costly and time consuming.Within the ERC consolidator grant 647857 “SENSOILs”, an artificial soil that becomes transparent during watering has beensuccessfully developed.

This technology, suited for small scale laboratory research, has shown great potential, enabling the discoveryof new forms of mobility by soil bacteria and mapping root induced chemical gradients at microscale resolution.Adsoils project proposes to move a step further and to demonstrate that the AdSoils solution can be fabricated and applied incommercial screens for the discovery of agrochemicals and genomic regions involved in water and nutrient use efficiency.

Theproject will identify cost-effective fabrication routes enabling a close mimic of natural soils and will produce a sufficient volume tovalidate the soil prototype with industrial end-users.