SBIR Phase I: Engineering the Plant Microbiome to Reduce Disease in Crops

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is the development of a platform technology that enables a novel mode of action for protecting crops from disease. Facing increasing disease pressure and a changing climate, growers around the world spend $80 billion on nearly six billion pounds of pesticides each year, and yet still experience yield losses of 20-40% due to pests and disease.

Broad-acting, chemical pesticides - currently the industry standard - are losing both efficacy and public support as resistance to pesticides spreads and the negative environmental impacts become clear. There is a pressing need to fundamentally redesign crop treatments to create a more sustainable and efficient food system. Leveraging synthetic biology, CRISPR, and data science, this SBIR Phase I project addresses this need by developing a new class of microbial biopesticides that precisely target and kill crop pathogens without adversely affecting beneficial microbes, insect pollinators, or humans.

With an initial focus on treating tomatoes (320,000 acres in the US, $32 million addressable market), this project sets the stage for providing solutions for major global markets like citrus ($600 million), olives ($1.8 billion), and rice ($2.7 billion).

The project provides targeted solutions for bacterial diseases in agriculture. Historically overlooked and underserved by the agricultural community, bacterial diseases have become increasingly devastating over the past 10-years due to a lack of effective treatment options, growing antimicrobial resistance, and climate change driving higher disease pressures.

Building from a prototype system, this SBIR Phase I project aims to engineer improvements that will increase the efficacy and tractability of the microbial biopesticide in outdoor agricultural environments. This includes applying molecular biology techniques to increase microbial colonization within complex microflora to increase product efficacy, extend microbial persistence in plants to provide longer protection, and reduce the rate of resistance to extend product lifetimes.

Furthermore, this project will develop a bioinformatics algorithm to better program the microbes to specifically target only the disease-causing pathogens. Finally, the team will demonstrate product efficacy in lab-grown tomato plants with the goal of surpassing the industry standard of 70% efficacy and will compare performance to two industry standard chemical pesticides.

Successful completion of this project will result in a novel method to introduce protective traits to crops without genetically modifying the plant itself.

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.