Partnership builds bacterial genome bank to create biopesticides

By Leonardo Gottems, reporter for AgroPages

The Brazilian company, Agrivalle conducted a study in partnership with the Chemical and Textile Industry Technology Center (SENAI CETIQT) for the sequencing, assembly and annotation of bacterial strains to develop biological solutions for pest and disease control.

“We can imagine microorganisms as a device that has a source code with a multitude of information. Studying it makes us better understand how it works and its unknown characteristics. It can lead us to new routes of the action of microorganisms,” explained Iron Amoreli, a researcher at Agrivalle.

Iron Amoreli

Through this information, he added, it is also possible to understand the “mechanisms of action and develop new technologies, and other possibilities for biotechnological application of a given microorganism.”

According to him, the project was of great importance due to its potential for generating, visualizing and applying genetic information. With the complete genome of the bacterium, the researcher could access this information to create and design solutions for the field more efficiently.

He pointed out that this study will provide more “speed” in the development of biopesticides. When observing a characteristic of a pest or disease, it was enough to search the culture bank for the microorganisms studied that can present the ideal combination for the solution and perform more agile tests in the active prospecting phase.

“We gained speed and gained momentum. This type of screening of characteristics of biotech potential makes it much easier when we are going to develop a new proof of concept, product or solution, in addition to new insights,” stated Isabella Kitano, a researcher at Agrivalle.

After all, she said, looking more closely at the entire DNA strand of a bacterium and microorganism could be the “key to discovering features that, without this study, we might never have known. In addition, genomic information opens up a field of exploration in the areas of gene editing and synthetic biology, which are territories of innovation that the company is developing.”

Agrivalle announced that it already had the genome of six microorganisms but had expansion plans, through partnerships like the one held with SENAI CETIQT, to create a platform and expand the bank's genomic information in a more optimized way. And, therefore, the goal was to quadruple the number of genomes in the next one to two years.

As explained by Amoreli, a complete bacterial profile could take nearly six months to complete. “And that is why, in our new stage of the project, which is underway, we will have over 15 lines in sequencing routes to be studied in the coming months,” the researcher said in conclusion.