Increasing agriculture productivity and sustainability through the use of disruptive sensors and software, to facilitate game changing and cost effective soil-health analysis within agriculture

FungiAlert正在农业技术领域开发改变游戏规则的技术，这种技术将通过开发破坏性的田间传感器来提高农业生产率和可持续性。该项目的目标是创造一种新产品，使种植者更容易进行土壤健康分析。这些新产品最终将允许种植者做出明智的农艺决定，以减轻作物病害造成的作物损失。这将对英国经济产生巨大影响，因为英国国内的作物病害每年可能造成高达24亿GB的损失，这突显了对颠覆性技术的需求，以促进土壤健康分析，提高作物产量。到目前为止，FungiAlert已经开发出第一个从土壤和水中检测真菌植物疾病的早期设备。其他土壤健康诊断方法提供了对该疾病的症状后识别。这种较晚的诊断并不总是有用的，因为一旦疾病出现症状，治疗就不有效，作物损失是不可避免的。FungiAlert的技术可以被描述为农民的烟雾探测器，因为它在疾病传播并造成毁灭性损失之前警告用户感染的风险。FungiAlert目前的技术可以检测真菌和卵菌病原体，然而，市场也需要一种产品，能够在一个传感器内同时检测多种类型的微生物(即真菌、卵菌和细菌)。这是由于农业中现有的毁灭性细菌疾病，例如顶端木霉_它正在摧毁欧洲的葡萄和橄榄作物，并威胁到英国的橡树(Ian Cox，Innovate UK Blog 2018)。就像个性化药物一样，不同种类的植物病原体对杀虫剂的敏感性不同，因此，需要准确识别疾病的种类，以便定制害虫管理策略。目前，FungiAlert提供了一种基因组方法来识别传感器检测到的疾病种类。新提出的传感器将具有更广泛的检测范围，因此，需要一种经济高效的元基因组方法。这将在田间采样点提供微生物群落的土壤健康分析，这将改变农业的游戏规则，因为它将有助于指导关键的农业决策(轮换决定、品种选择、作物保护战略、收获时间等)。这一项目将使FungiAlert能够为土壤健康分析提供改变游戏规则和成本效益的技术，革新农业实践，提高作物生产率和促进可持续农业。“

"FungiAlert is developing game changing technology within agritech that will increase agricultural productivity and sustainability through the development of disruptive in-the-field sensors. The objective of this project is to create a new product and make soil-health analysis more accessible to growers. The new offerings would ultimately allow growers to make informed agronomy decisions to mitigate crop loss due to crop disease. This would have a huge impact on the UK economy, as crop diseases within the UK can account for losses of up £2.4bn per year, highlighting the need for disruptive technologies to promote soil-health analysis, for increased crop yields.To date, FungiAlert has developed the first early detection device for fungal plant diseases from soil and water. Other soil-health diagnostic methods offer post-symptomatic identification of the disease. This late diagnosis is not always useful, as once the disease is symptomatic, the treatment is not efficient and crop losses are inevitable. FungiAlert's technology can be described as the smoke detector for farmers, since it alerts the user about the risk of infection before the disease spreads and causes devastating losses. FungiAlert's current technology detects fungal and oomycetal pathogens, however, the market is also demanding a product than can simultaneously detect multiple types of microorganisms within one sensor (i.e. fungi, oomycetes and bacteria). This is due to existing devastating bacterial diseases in agriculture, such as as _Xylella fastidiosa_ which is destroying grape and olive crops in Europe and is threatening the oak trees in the UK (Ian Cox, Innovate UK blog 2018).Like personalised-medicine, different species of plant pathogens have different susceptibility to pesticides, therefore, there is a need to precisely identify the species of disease, in order to tailor pest management strategies. Currently, FungiAlert offers a genomic approach to identify the species of diseases detected by the sensors. The new proposed sensor will have a wider detection scope, therefore, there is a need for a cost efficient metagenomic approach. This would provide soil-health analysis of the microbial community at the point of sampling in the field, this would be game-changing for agriculture, as it would help guide key agricultural decisions (rotational decisions, variety selection, crop protection strategies, harvest time etc.).This project would allow FungiAlert to offer game changing and cost efficient technology for soil-health analysis, revolutionising agricultural practices, and increasing crop productivity and promoting sustainable farming."