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

这项小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛影响是开发一种平台技术，使保护作物免受疾病侵害的新行动模式成为可能。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在近60亿磅的农药上花费800亿美元，但由于病虫害，产量仍然损失20-40%。目前的行业标准——作用广泛的化学农药——正在失去药效和公众的支持，因为对农药的耐药性正在蔓延，对环境的负面影响也越来越明显。迫切需要从根本上重新设计作物处理方式，以创建一个更可持续、更高效的粮食系统。利用合成生物学、CRISPR和数据科学，SBIR一期项目通过开发一类新的微生物生物农药来解决这一需求，这些农药可以精确地靶向和杀死作物病原体，而不会对有益微生物、昆虫传粉者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32万英亩，3200万美元的潜在市场），为柑橘（6亿美元）、橄榄（18亿美元）和大米（27亿美元）等主要全球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有针对性的解决方案。细菌性疾病历来被农业社区忽视和服务不足，在过去10年中，由于缺乏有效的治疗选择、抗菌素耐药性不断增强以及气候变化导致疾病压力增加，细菌性疾病变得越来越具有破坏性。从一个原型系统开始，这个SBIR一期项目旨在设计改进，以提高微生物生物农药在室外农业环境中的功效和可追溯性。这包括应用分子生物学技术来增加微生物在复杂菌群中的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，并降低耐药性以延长产品寿命。此外，该项目将开发一种生物信息学算法，以更好地编程微生物，使其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上展示产品功效，目标是超过70%功效的行业标准，并将性能与两种行业标准化学农药进行比较。该项目的成功完成将产生一种新的方法，无需对作物本身进行基因改造就可以将保护性性状引入作物。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.