Agragene Expands Program to Help Farmers Control Fruit Flys

Apr 15, 2021

Agragene, Inc., a biotechnology company focused on suppressing invasive crop pests using biological insect control technology, announced today that it has expanded its SentinelTM program to help growers monitor spotted wing drosophila (SWD) populations year-round by trapping in natural border habitats surrounding agricultural fields.

Agragene is assisting growers in observing where SWD take refuge, feed and breed while tracking how their relative populations shift over time. Agragene has hired Peerbolt Crop Management (PCM) to provide this service to all interested growers. The Agragene Regional SWD Report is published in the Small Fruit Update newsletter provided by the Northwest Berry Foundation on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Growers can sign-up for free at Growers - Agragene to obtain comprehensive SWD reports including insights from Agragene’s entomologists and the PCM team.

The announcement comes as many fruit growers reported their toughest season yet combatting the hardy and damaging SWD, which arrived in the U.S. in 2008. SWD feed on ripening fruit causing extensive economic injury. Agragene’s technologies target SWD with a biocontrol platform to help growers monitor and more naturally manage the pest.

“Given the explosion of this fly population, we are pleased with the strong demand and positive feedback from growers on our initial trap reports throughout Oregon’s Northern Willamette Valley,” said Clyde Shores, Agragene Chief Business Officer. “We now service more areas in central and southern Oregon and will expand to additional regions in Oregon, Washington and California to assist as many growers as possible. “

“We’ve been partnering with fruit growers to manage SWD since it showed up in the Pacific Northwest in 2009 and have developed a comprehensive data collection and reporting system. Now, with Agragene’s expertise and resources supporting this greatly expanded monitoring program we can give growers the field-by-field information they need to make more precise, effective and data-driven decisions about SWD control,” said Tom Peerbolt, Co-founder of PCM and Director at The Northwest Berry Foundation.

About Agragene

Agragene is a biotechnology company focused on suppressing invasive crop pests using biological insect control technology. Agragene is committed to working with growers to establish new, more effective integrated pest management (IPM) solutions. In addition to the SentinelTM insect monitoring service, Agragene is commercializing sustainable Biocontrol-as-a-Service using biological crop pest control agents that are non-polluting and thus environmentally safe and acceptable. Biocontrol reduces the use of environmentally unsafe chemicals. This encourages a more natural ecological balance providing a safe harbor for beneficial insects, such as bees and ladybugs. Insecticide use is decreased which enhances the effectiveness of IPM. Agragene has initially focused the platform on SWD and plans to expand to other insect crop pests in the future.

About Peerbolt Crop Management

Peerbolt Crop Management

Peerbolt Crop Management (PCM) began in 1992. Since its inception, PCM’s goal has been to facilitate the sustainable production of horticultural crops in the Northwest through IPM (Integrated Pest Management) based field services, on-farm research, consulting and information dissemination. For 28 years, we have closely collaborated with growers, researchers, industry members and government agencies, attaining a unique industry perspective and promoting sustainable production methods.

About Northwest Berry Foundation

Northwest Berry Foundation (nwberryfoundation.org)

The Northwest Berry Foundation exists to strengthen the NW berry industry through on-farm research, grower education and information sharing, and reducing food waste. The Small Fruit Update is a weekly resource for the Northwest berry industry. It features regional crop reports, industry news, pest management, research and industry events. The Small Fruit Update is free to all readers, made possible by the dedicated sponsorships from regional fruit commissions and councils across the Northwest and North America.

Source : agragene

Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.