Smart Soil Bugs Offer Farmers an Ecofriendly Route to Controlling Crop Diseases
Published:26 Jan.2022 Source:John Innes Centre
An innovative method of controlling a range of damaging crop diseases using native, beneficial soil bacteria has emerged from a research-industry collaboration.
The Agri-tech innovation hopes to give farmers a way to reduce the cost and environmental damage caused by the chemical treatments currently in use to control crop diseases. The John Innes Centre team isolated and tested hundreds of strains of Pseudomonas bacteria from the soil of a commercial potato field, and then sequenced the genomes of 69 of these strains.