Plug and play microfluidics for frontier Agri-Tech assays

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Development of plug and play lab-on-chip technologies for high-throughput profiling of pesticide metabolic degradation: One of the greatest bottlenecks in the agrichemical industry is the lack of a quantitative and predictive understanding of how pesticides are metabolised by a given species (both desired and undesired). This goes to the heart of many unresolved challenges the industry faces, which centre around the following questions: How can we use fewer pesticides, thus minimising environmental exposure? How can we design pesticides that are more specific to the target pest, avoiding non-target species? How can we reduce the cost of getting an agrichemical to market using predictive tools to make decisions upstream of the development pipeline? Understanding how a pesticide is metabolised by a species of interest therefore of central importance for compound development, and determination of its bioavailability. Current methods to probe pesticide metabolism are slow, laborious, and low-throughput: compounds are essentially tested one-by-one, considerably reducing possibilities to test new molecules. This project will bring together our expertise in microfluidics, analytical chemistry, metabolomics, and agri-science to develop new state-of-the-art platforms, allowing us to tackle this challenge head-on. Our technologies will fuse robotic sampling, continuous flow microfluidics, and microdroplet production to generate a library of active ingredients (AIs) that will be incubated with a model pathogen. Metabolic degradation of the AIs within each droplet will be measured online using coupled rapid sub-30-second analytical separation and/or mass spectrometry directly, to yield thousands of data points within a single run. When coupled to big-data analysis, rapid screening will allow us to build a suite of predictive models to correlate chemical structure with metabolic degradation characteristics. Our lab-on-chip setup will be a step-change from current methods, which rely on manual handling of well plates. Importantly, our technologies will be enabling ones: once established, they can be repurposed to assay multiple cell types, and extended to transcriptomic, proteomic & lipidomic analysis in future iterations.