Fungus as Bio Pesticide

The scientist or researcher at the biosciences company Novozyymes, the head of agricultural research there has discovered a new bio pesticide. It is a kind of fungus getting rid of the insect pest; moreover, the white coat (this kind of fungus) can produce spores which will blow in the wind to infect another insect too. The company has just come up with a way to produce it at an industrial scale, stabilize it and finally give it to farmers as a powerful bio pesticide.

it can be considered as the next great things in the field of agriculture. Shawn Semones, the head of agricultural research and development at the biosciences company Novozymes said “This is a naturally occurring microorganism”.

Nowadays around the world many scientists are looking at how to use the diversity of microbes found in soil to help farmers produce more with less; for example, recently Novozymes have signed a 300 million us dollars dealing with the seed and chemical giant Monsanto to help bring new discoveries in the microbial world to farmer’s fields. So this is one indication of the promise which researchers see for these tiny microbes to help farmers to produce their crops by the ways mentioned above.

It is important that agriculture have to produce about 70 percent more by mid-century as it is expected that by 2050 the world population will reach to nine billion from seven billion today and they are getting richer and demanding the better food as well.

The soil beneath our feet could be where the researchers are finding answers to that challenge. Jeff Dangl, the biology professor of University of North Carolina said “Soil is teeming with life and a gram of soil contains anywhere from a hundred million to a billion microbes”.

That megalopolis of microbes is involved in a thriving barter economy with the plants that share the soil and plants make sugar through photosynthesis.

Dangl also said that much of the sugar is actually pumped down through the roots where it is turned into sugar-based microbe food and secretes into the soil as they do that specifically to recruit microbes to help the plants grow better.

Some of those recruits change chemicals in the air and soil into food that the plants can eat and other microbes can be considered as bodyguards producing antibiotics and other chemicals to fight off the bad germs. It the present, Novozymes has already sold one type of fungus that helps plants get phosphorous from the soil.

Dangl also said that what is really blown this field open is the realization that if we want to understand the way the plant organism functions, we have to consider its bacterial and fungal friends part of that organism.

In human medicine, the same realization is taking place and scientists remark that the microbes living on and in every one of us whose cells exists  more than our own 10-1 are much more important than we realize how much they perform. Apart from they help us digest food we have, a developing body of research also shows that these biomass are involved in everything from allergies to obesity to regulating moods.

these discoveries depend upon the advances in DNA sequencing a lot. At the beginning, the technology used to decode humans’ entire genetic blueprint has come so far in just the last few years, Dangl also says, that “we now can, for $50, sequence the complete genome of essentially any bacteria on earth.” Moreover, Ron Turco, a scientist at Purdue University said that our technical abilities have gone through the roof in terms of understanding what’s in a gram of soil; for example, soil from one specific field may prevent peas from getting a wilting disease.

He also said that there is something in that soil and you take your genetic tools and you look for things that are different, and you can bring out the organisms that are doing that job. But it is not easy. You can show an effect in soil but sometimes you can never really isolate that bacteria out. It is a whole art form to recover a microorganism from soil. And that’s not insignificant because of a microbe that works in one place not necessarily working in another.

There is an example supporting this remark. The researchers in the northwestern United States have found bacteria that fight a fungus which rots the roots of wheat plants, but UN’s Jeff Dangl notes, they don’t seem to work anywhere else.

Dangl is also a co-founder of a North Carolina start up company, AgBiome, which is working on this problem hopes to develop a seed treatment that combines several disease-fighting and fertilizing microbes into a probiotic mix that works in a variety of soils.

In greenhouses, a bacterium that fights off a common fungal disease is one of their most promising leads. Dan Tomso, an AgBiome’s chief science officer said that in the lab, it produces the kind of control you would usually achieve with a commercial fungicide chemical.

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