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

SBIR 第一阶段：改造植物微生物组以减少作物疾病

• 批准号: 2232769
• 负责人: Andrea Wallace
• 金额: $ 27.5万
• 依托单位: ROBIGO, INC.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-05-01 至 2025-04-30
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2232769&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; Engineering; Plant; Microbiome

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.

这个小企业创新研究 (SBIR) 第一阶段项目的更广泛影响是开发一种平台技术，该技术能够提供一种保护作物免受疾病侵害的新型行动模式。面对日益增加的疾病压力和不断变化的气候，世界各地的种植者每年花费 800 亿美元购买近 60 亿磅农药，但仍因病虫害而遭受 20-40% 的产量损失。随着农药耐药性的蔓延和对环境的负面影响变得越来越明显，作用广泛的化学农药（目前的行业标准）正在失去功效和公众支持。迫切需要从根本上重新设计作物处理方法，以创建更可持续、更高效的粮食系统。利用合成生物学、CRISPR 和数据科学，SBIR 第一阶段项目通过开发一类新型微生物生物农药来满足这一需求，这些生物农药能够精确瞄准并杀死作物病原体，而不会对有益微生物、昆虫传粉媒介或人类产生不利影响。该项目最初的重点是处理西红柿（美国 320,000 英亩土地，价值 3200 万美元的潜在市场），为向柑橘（6 亿美元）、橄榄（18 亿美元）和大米（27 亿美元）等全球主要市场提供解决方案奠定了基础。 ）。该项目为农业细菌性疾病提供针对性的解决方案。由于缺乏有效的治疗方案、抗生素耐药性不断增加以及气候变化导致疾病压力增加，过去十年来，细菌性疾病一直被农业界忽视和忽视，其破坏性越来越大。该 SBIR 第一阶段项目以原型系统为基础，旨在进行改进，以提高微生物生物农药在户外农业环境中的功效和易处理性。这包括应用分子生物学技术来增加复杂微生物群中的微生物定植，以提高产品功效，延长微生物在植物中的持久性以提供更长的保护，并降低耐药率以延长产品寿命。此外，该项目将开发一种生物信息学算法，以更好地对微生物进行编程，以专门针对致病病原体。最后，该团队将在实验室种植的番茄植株中展示产品功效，目标是超越 70% 功效的行业标准，并将与两种行业标准化学农药的性能进行比较。该项目的成功完成将产生一种无需对植物本身进行基因改造即可向作物引入保护性状的新方法。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。