AgroPages-Frontier Scientific acquires premier ag industry supplier-Agricultural news

Frontier Scientific, Inc. (FSI) announced the expansion of its agricultural products offering through the acquisition of a leading supplier of insect products to provide researchers proven quality solutions for insecticide compound screening, seed development and crop protection.

Agricultural expansion is a natural fit for FSI’s established areas of expertise in complex supply issues, custom chemistry capabilities, existing chemical offering, compound management for screening, and crop protection pipeline.

"This allows us to expand and strengthen current relationships and provide a solid foundation for future discovery, development and commercialization," said W. Tim Miller, President and CEO of FSI. "This is a unique way to complement our current applications by leveraging our existing capabilities," said Miller.

"As the crop protection market grows, the need for testing against problem insects will grow. Our core competency is the consistent scaled production and delivery of insect products, principally Lepidopteran species, of agricultural interest," stated Dave Davis, Senior Director of Operations for this new business unit of FSI.

Existing agricultural projects within FSI include novel compounds in development and field testing to address citrus greening disease, methyl erythritol phosphate pathway inhibitors as herbicides, and light activated compounds being evaluated as fungicides to address crop problems like wheat rust and fusarium wilt in bananas and as insecticides against mosquito larvae and cherry fruit flies.

With this acquisition, FSI will also be expanding its existing protein expression capabilities using insect larvae as the expression host.