Agtech
Biofilms play a significant part in the deterioration and spoilage of foods such as grain, fruit and vegetables at all stages from farm to fork.
The expanding global population, cost of transport and world tension means the value of food as a commodity is likely to continue to increase for the foreseeable future. In parallel, many of the biocides, and especially fungicides, that are on the market for preventing fungal deterioration of food are becoming less effective, more expensive to manufacture and are under scrutiny.
New and effective strategies are needed to control disease. Our technology is highly effective at stopping fungal growth across a wide range of fungi at very low concentrations that do not kill the fungus, and therefore do not promote development of resistance. This is a unique offering and game changing in the approach to preventing fungal destruction of seed crops and fruit, as well as cut flowers.
It has recently been demonstrated that Botrytis cinerea, one of the main fungi which causes large crop and post-harvest losses worldwide, uses the chemical communication pathways that are targeted by our technology. This, and the very promising proof of concept work that has been undertaken against relevant crop spoilage fungi by a potential commercial partner, means we will be accelerating R&D in this area.