SBIR Phase II: Development of eco-friendly peptide bioprotectant for devastating late blight control

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will be to control several critical pathogens and pests on multiple crops, in order to help feed the growing world population more sustainably. The global crop pest and disease control landscape is facing big challenges: many diseases are not well controlled and important chemical pesticides are restricted or banned due to their toxicity. There is a critical need for new types of disease control products that will be effective and will not harm the environment or human health. This proposal will lead to the development of a platform that can quickly generate new products to target poorly controlled pathogens, mitigating the development of resistant pathogens. This solution will increase farmers’ productivity and reduce their financial losses, while ensuring a more secure food supply.The proposed project will identify ecologically-safe peptides that will protect crops from diseases. The peptides will be designed to bind to, and interfere with, the function of proteins that the disease organisms produce, and which are essential to the disease process. The peptides will be designed to bind only to those proteins, so they will not have off-target effects. The ability to rapidly design and test such peptides will make it possible to target multiple proteins from a pathogen, reducing the risk that the pathogen will develop resistance. It will also be possible to target a wide range of diseases with similar life cycles, providing farmers with broad protection. The project will choose the optimum target proteins, design the peptides, and optimize the peptides to maximize binding to the targets. The peptides will be tested for their ability to prevent infection in the lab, and then will be produced at a larger scale and tested under the field conditions. The peptides will also be tested for safety as required for regulatory approval.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.