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Your Situation: Successful crop management requires targeted protection against pests and diseases. Historically, such protection has involved chemical pesticides, such as herbicides, fungicides or insecticides, sometimes with negative off-target effects. Such effects may contaminate the environment, degrade biodiversity and/or jeopardize human health.

In the context of organic and low-residue farming, we seek to protect against pests and diseases with precision-designed Biocontrolants with minimal bioaccumulation. Yet, legacy approaches by wet-lab-driven iterations are laborious and unaffordable for many applications, particularly for region-specific or low-profit crop hazards in developing countries. Examples are banana fusarium wilt fungus, East African maize lethal necrosis (MLN) or West African cocoa swollen shoot disease (CSSD).

Our Proposal: We propose rational precision design of crop Biocontrolants in silico can accelerate and partly replace legacy wet-lab-driven in vitro and in vivo iterations.

• Commercially, in silico projects shorten development timelines, from months to days, and render crop Biocontrolants more scalable, competitive and affordable. They furthermore accelerate IP protection.
• Technically, in silico approaches let us explore pathogen biology and molecular interactions at speed, depth and visibility impossible in the lab alone. They also support environmental impact modeling, bioprotectant resistance assessments and mitigation strategies.

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Precision-designed bioprotectants include small biomolecules, peptides and natural RNA molecules, possibly triggering and enhancing plant’s own biological defense mechanisms:

• Antimicrobial peptides (AMP), disrupting pathogen membranes or proteins, involving in silico peptide folding, membrane interaction simulation, stability & toxicity assessment, and synthesis prediction;
• RNA aptamers, binding to a target. e.g. viral coat proteins or fungal effectors, possibly discovered through systemic evolution of ligands, involving in silico structure-function-engineering;
• Small-molecule inhibitors, inhibiting plant pathogens or fungal enzymes, discovered by virtual screening, involving in silico docking to effector proteins and ADMET filtering;
• Spray-, microbe- or host-induced gene silencing (SIGS, MIGS, HIGS) applying pathogen-gene-matching yet naturally degrading dsRNA molecules to trigger RNA inference (RNAi) to silence genes. This reduces the pest’s ability to survive or infect:
  1. HIGS is a long-term, stable solution, but requires genetic modification of the crop;
  2. SIGS is a short-term solution with repeat applications, but does not require genetic crop modification;
  3. MIGS is a medium-term, more persistent alternative to SIGS, given self-propagating microbes.

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