By Zach Winn
Each year, farmers around the world spend $80 billion on pesticides for their crops. Those pesticides impact not only harmful insects but also bees and beneficial bacteria in the soil. They can also run off into waterways and harm the environment. And, they are increasingly being linked to human diseases like Parkinson’s and cancer.
Amid growing awareness of those problems, pesticides made from living microbes are gaining popularity. Unfortunately, such microbial pesticides are often less effective, forcing farmers to choose between potential environmental damage and higher crop yields.
Now, Robigo is equipping naturally occurring microbes with more potent pest-fighting capabilities. The company, which was co-founded by Andee Wallace PhD ’20, uses technologies more commonly associated with medical applications, like RNA interference and CRISPR, to engineer self-replicating microbes that target plant pathogens more precisely than chemical pesticides and more effectively than other biologically based solutions.
“Chemical pesticides have been a cornerstone of agricultural production for the past 70 years, to the point that it’s nearly impossible to envision an agricultural system without them,” Wallace says. “But that’s the long-term vision we have: providing growers new tools to enable a food system that is in balance with the environment, and that is productive, resilient, and safe.”
Source : mit.edu