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Of all mushrooms, Botrytis cinerea it is what keeps farmers awake at night. He wants to eat dirty mushrooms. Luckily, he eats hundreds of plant species — although soft fruits like grapes are his favorite — covering everything he eats with a velvety layer of mold. If you’ve ever left strawberries in the fridge for too long and turned them seemingly gray-green, it’s likely to be one of the spores that is always present. Botrytis floating through the air decided to make your dessert home forever.
A spoiled dessert is a pain, sure, but for the food industry Botrytis poses a major problem. This single species of fungus is at least responsible $ 10,000 billion in damage to crops every year. Some estimates include only $ 100,000 billion. It is so annoying that it was classified as a survey of plant pathologists the second most important plant pathogen, which can be described as the equivalent of their industry TIME the “Most Influential People” list in the magazine. (He got first place Magnaporthe oryzae: a fungus that destroys rice fields around the world.)
“It’s the biggest,” says Mark Singleton, head of plant and animal health at GreenLight Biosciences, a Massachusetts-based biotech startup working on a new generation of spray defense. Botrytis and other pests with bedevil farmers. The disadvantages of existing fungicides and pesticides are well known: spray residues can accumulate in the environment and damage non-target organisms, and overuse can evolve resistance to pests and weeds. Singleton is working on a way to address these issues. And its starting point is RNA: a DNA-like molecule that is one of the basic components of life.
This new generation of pesticides is based on a cellular trick that is at least a billion years old. the last common ancestor animals, plants, fungi and protists. At some point — we don’t know exactly when — cells developed the ability to shrink and destroy genetic material from invasive pathogens, such as viruses. When a cell detects the presence of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) —a part of the genetic code that viruses use to duplicate itself — it pirates this dsRNA into small pieces. these dsRNA fragments are like tiny cartridges that are desired. The molecules in the cell pick up and use the matching messenger RNA (mRNA) fragments, the molecules that the cells use to convert genetic information into protein. If the malignant molecule divides before it becomes a protein, the cell will embark on a successful invasion.
The discovery of this process, called RNA interference (RNAi), led two scientists in 2006. Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It also sparked a race to develop new tools based on that. Scientists soon realized that if dsRNA entered a pathogenic pathogen — a particularly irritating fungus, for example — it could command the cells of that pathogen to destroy its mRNA and produce crucial proteins. Basically, the internal genes of pathogens can be shed at will. “We’re going in there and looking at the orchestra of genes and proteins there and we’re silencing the violins. That’s all we’re doing, ”says Michael Helmstetter, president of RNAissance Ag, another startup competing to bring RNA crop sprays to market.
They are already working on a handful of RNA sprays. RNAissance Ag is working on a spray aimed at the diamond-backed moth, which has an insatiable hunger for November and he had already developed some resistance to common pesticides. GreenLight Biosciences has an RNA spray targeted at the Colorado potato beetle, which is being evaluated by the Environmental Protection Agency. The company expects a decision on that spray by mid-2022. He is also working on a spray. Botritisa, as well as one who fights Varroa mite, a widespread plague that infects honey with bees. After initial laboratory testing, GreenLight is testing its Botrytis spray on California grapes and Italian strawberries. Singleton says they want to know how long the spray sticks to plants and how it compares to chemical fungicides.
RNA crop sprays can have some major advantages over the current chemical pesticide toolbox. Microbes break up soil RNA in a couple of days, which reduces the problem of environmental accumulation. And since RNA spray would target genes specific to individual species, there is a much lower chance of trapping other organisms in crossfire — at least in theory. Even if the two very similar species have enough genetic differences, it is possible to make RNA sprays that target one mistake by leaving only the other, says Clauvis NT Taning, a postdoctoral researcher at RNA at the University of Ghent in Belgium.
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