Characterising novel insecticide transport to maximise efficiency and minimize environmental impact

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One of the greatest global priorities is finding strategies that will support the supply of high quality, nutritious food for the worlds fast-growing population. One vital strand that will support this is the development of novel efficient, safe insecticides with low environmental impact.The development of insecticides has been highly successful at targeting specific active protein sites, however there are a host of physical and molecular barriers between the application site and active site of insecticide molecules. There is currently a lack of understanding of the interactions that take place between the active molecules and these biological barriers and indeed, the efficiency of transport through these barriers is not simply based on the active insecticide its self, but depends strongly on the applied formulation and its physical state.While there has been progress in both modeling and machine learning approaches to predicting the transport and efficacy of insecticides, these approaches are also severely hampered by lack of input characterization data relating to membrane transport.In this project we aim to develop a modular, lab based, milli-fluidic measurement platform that will allow rapid characterisation the transport of insecticides across serial model membranes and in-vitro physical barriers. This data will allow direct rapid screening and prediction of efficiency of candidate molecules, and optimisation of formulation, and we will feed into machine learning approaches that will allow us to predict membrane transport based on molecular structure. The approaches employed here will be aligned with those used within BASF and so will feed directly into their supervised and unsupervised predictive models to significantly enhance the efficiency and targeting of insecticide discovery and development. By significantly expanding the developmental parameter space beyond target site identification and interactions, we anticipate that, in the future this will lead to development of insecticide formulations with lower applied concentrations, increased specificity and improved environmental performance.