CAREER: Abiotic degradation of emerging RNA interference pesticides

Modern agriculture employs a variety of tools to increase food production to meet the growing demands of the world’s population. This has resulted in increasing need for efficient and effective fertilizers and pesticides. Increasingly, innovations in biotechnology are being made to address these needs.

However, the adoption of biotechnology leads to new challenges in ensuring the safety and sustainability of agricultural practices. The goal of this CAREER project is to assess key degradation processes that determine the environmental fate of emerging pesticides that use double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) as their active agent. This will be achieved through an integrated research program to identify specific processes that degrade dsRNA pesticides in the environment.

Successful completion of this research will enable the safe, sustainable, and effective use of dsRNA pesticides to simultaneously support U.S. agricultural practices and minimize potential environmental impacts. Educational activities integrated with this research plan will train environmental engineers to address emerging challenges that arise from the rapid and ongoing development of synthetic biotechnology products for use in agriculture and other sectors. Societal benefits will result from an increased STEM workforce and greater scientific literacy.

The goal of this CAREER project is to elucidate the abiotic degradation pathways for dsRNA pesticides in soils, in surface water, and on leaf surfaces. This goal will be achieved by (1) elucidating underlying abiotic mechanisms of hydrolysis, denaturation, depurination, and photodegradation that occur under environmentally relevant conditions; (2) developing and applying novel product-oriented methods to distinguish dsRNA degradation by specific mechanisms in complex environmental media; and (3) determining the impact of molecular features and formulations of dsRNA pesticides on their degradation.

By defining processes that control the degradation of dsRNA pesticides, this project advances fundamental knowledge on the environmental fate and persistence of nucleic acids, including microbial genetic markers. These research activities are integrated with an education program promoting the application of environmental engineering principles to the risk assessment of dsRNA pesticides and other biotechnology products.

The specific objectives of the education program are (1) to train Environmental Engineering students to contribute to risk assessment of emerging products through research and project-based learning; (2) to promote multidisciplinary discourse on biotechnology safety through a graduate student-led seminar series; and (3) to support engagement in safe and sustainable applications of agricultural biotechnology through a scalable high school outreach program. The integrated research and educational activities proposed herein will position the environmental engineering field to address new multidisciplinary challenges arising from the rapid and ongoing development of biotechnology products.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.