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

小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目的更广泛影响是开发了一种平台技术，使保护作物免受疾病侵袭的新行动模式成为可能。面对越来越大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60亿磅的杀虫剂，但由于病虫害，仍有20%-40%的产量损失。随着杀虫剂耐药性的蔓延和对环境的负面影响变得明显，目前的行业标准--广效化学杀虫剂--正在失去药效和公众支持。迫切需要从根本上重新设计作物处理，以创造一个更可持续和更高效的粮食系统。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种新型微生物生物杀虫剂来满足这一需求，这种新型微生物生物杀虫剂可以精确地瞄准和杀死作物病原体，而不会对有益的微生物、昆虫传粉者或人类产生不利影响。该项目最初的重点是种植西红柿(在美国占地32万英亩，潜在市场价值3200万美元)，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。该项目为农业中的细菌性疾病提供了有针对性的解决方案。在过去的10年里，由于缺乏有效的治疗选择，不断增长的抗菌素耐药性，以及气候变化导致更大的疾病压力，细菌性疾病在历史上被农业社区忽视和服务不足，具有越来越大的破坏性。这个SBIR第一阶段项目以原型系统为基础，旨在设计改进方案，以提高微生物生物杀虫剂在室外农业环境中的有效性和可操作性。这包括应用分子生物学技术增加微生物在复杂微生物区系中的定殖率以提高产品效率，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，使其仅针对导致疾病的病原体。最后，该团队将在实验室种植的番茄植株中展示产品的功效，目标是超过70%药效的行业标准，并将其性能与两种行业标准化学杀虫剂进行比较。该项目的成功完成将带来一种新的方法，在不对作物本身进行基因修改的情况下将保护性特征引入作物。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已通过使用基金会的智力优势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.