For Earth Day, Good News Re: Pesticide Prevention
By Jill Brooke
We all know that pesticides are bad for the planet. But now researchers in Singapore and Cambridge, Massachusetts have created a plant vaccine that could be an alternative to chemical spraying.
This is such good news. The poisons in chemical spray are bad for the following reasons.
1. Pesticides wash away with rain and go into water.
2. Pesticides stay in some of the edible parts of plants that we consume and can lead to cancer.
3. It kills useful insects which help in pollination. And we all know that is a problem. In fact, fertilizers impact how bees see flowers.
As writer Lindsay Campbell shared, “Imagine a world where on-farm robots can deliver tiny injections into each plant, rendering crops resistant to the latest disease or rampant pest. It might also be possible to give growing fruits, vegetables, herbs, and spices a jab as a quick way to send nutrients right to the source.
“This is how a group of biomaterial scientists and engineers are envisioning the future of crops after developing the first microneedle-based drug delivery technique for plants.”
Their paper, published in the journal Advanced Materials, details how they were able to provide small compounds to a wide variety of plants and monitor plant response via biomaterial injection.
For roughly a year and a half, researchers based in Singapore and Cambridge, Massachusetts tested the needles using GA3, a plant growth regulator widely used in agriculture. Via genetic analysis, the group was able to closely examine the reaction of tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, rice, corn, barley and soybeans and confirm the effectiveness of the method, noting that it resulted in minimal scar and callus formation.
Benedetto Marelli, a corresponding author of the paper and associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that the research on microneedle technology was motivated by the desire to offer farmers an alternative to spraying that is more sustainable and ecologically friendly.
“There is increasing pressure for the agriculture sector to adapt and stay resilient to the realities of climate change,” says Marelli. “When we consider the current option of spraying, it is scalable, but it can be harmful to the farmer and the environment by sending particles into the air or percolating in the soil, going into the aquifer and then draining into the water stream.”
According to Marelli, when sprays are used, roughly 50 to 90 percent of an application ends up in the air or soil or doesn’t get fully absorbed into the plant tissue. The reason why the technology holds so much promise, he says, is because it offers a precise and streamlined way to deliver a substance by directly targeting the plant tissue. And because the needles are made of silk, they are biodegradable.
“You minimize the waste,” says Marelli.
While the invention is essentially a plant vaccine, these needles aren’t like the syringes used at the doctor’s office. To make them, Marelli and his team mixed functional compounds (in this case, GA3) into a silk fibroin solution. The mixture was then cast into a mold to dry and form the needles. Researchers used tweezers to grab the needles and pierce them into the plant tissue to release the compound directly inside the plant.
Yunteng Cao, the first author of the paper and postdoc researcher at MIT, says there are many ways in which the technology could make a positive impact, but Cao sees the microneedle as an especially promising solution to citrus greening disease, which has decimated the orange industry, particularly in Florida. A 2020 study estimated the damage of the disease amounted to more than $1 billion in annual revenue losses and 5,000 jobs lost each year in the sunshine state.
According to Marelli, when sprays are used, roughly 50 to 90 percent of an application ends up in the air or soil or doesn’t get fully absorbed into the plant tissue. The reason why the technology holds so much promise, he says, is because it offers a precise and streamlined way to deliver a substance by directly targeting the plant tissue. And because the needles are made of silk, they are biodegradable.
Just shows that there are a lot of good people researching options to make the earth safer and healthier. And we can each do our part.
Jill Brooke is a former CNN correspondent, Post columnist and editor-in-chief of Avenue and Travel Savvy magazine. She is an author and the editorial director of FPD and a contributor to Florists Review magazine.
Photo Credit: Pixabay