In all the fungus there, Botritis cinerea and who restrain the farmers at night. Scuzzy mushrooms have a craving for food. It will happily eat a variety of plants — even though the grape-like fruit is the most popular — to cover everything it eats with a smooth mold. If you have left the strawberry bowl in the fridge for a while and come back to find them looking green, there is a chance that one of the spores will always be present. Botritis Disease floating in the air decided to make it their eternal abode in your diet.
Polluted salt is bitter, sure, but for the food industry Botritis Disease it causes a big problem. Only one type of fungus causes it $ 10 billion in damage to the crop every year. Some estimates put the figure at $ 100 billion. It is so complex that research into plants has been classified as the second most important plant fungi are pathogens, which can be described as part of their industry TIME the “Most Influenced People” magazine. (The top spot is gone Magnaporthe oryzae: a fungus that destroys rice fields around the world.)
“It’s huge,” says Mark Singleton, chief of plant and animal health at GreenLight Biosciences, Massachusetts, a Massachusetts-based spray company that works to spray pesticides for protection. Botritis Disease and other pests that bedevil growers. Disadvantages of fungicides and pesticides are well known: Residues from sprays can multiply in the environment and destroy unwanted organisms, while their overuse can cause pests and weeds to become resistant. Singleton is struggling to cope. And to begin with RNA: a molecule similar to DNA that is one of the most important living organisms.
This new generation of pesticides has been based on cell fraud, which began more than a billion years ago. last parent about animals, plants, fungi, and artists. At some point – we are not sure – when cells changed to be able to jump and destroy genetics from pathogens, such as viruses. When a cell detects the presence of RNA (dsRNA) consisting of two circular lines that viruses use to reproduce themselves – it breaks down this dsRNA into smaller pieces. The dsRNA chunks are like little-needed screens. Cell molecules are synthesized and used to track messenger RNA (mRNA) – molecules that are used to convert genetic instructions into proteins. If the bad molecules are broken down before they can be made into proteins, the cell will begin to attack normally.
The discovery of this method – called RNA interference (RNAi) – was discovered by two scientists in 2006. Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It also sparked a competition for new weapons based on it. Scientists soon discovered that if you induced dsRNA into pathogens, for example, fungi, you could instruct the pathogen cells to destroy its mRNA and stop it from producing essential proteins. Instead, they are able to shut down genes within the pathogen at will. “We just go in there and look for a band of geneticists and proteins out there and we stop violin singing. That’s all we do, “said Michael Helmstetter, chairman of RNAissance Ag, another founder who wants to bring RNA seed pumps to market.
Few RNA pumps are already in operation. RNAissance Ag is working on a pump that fights against the diamondback moth, which has an insatiable craving for cabbage has already changed its rejection to common medicine. GreenLight Biosciences contains RNA smoke directly from the potato beetle in Colorado where it is being monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency. The company is awaiting a decision on that smoke by mid-2022. It is also working on spraying. Botritis, and which is struggling with Varroa mite, the most common pest that destroys honey bees. After initial laboratory testing, GreenLight is now testing Botrytis spraying on grapes in California with strawberry in Italy. Singleton says he is looking to determine how long the spray sticks to the plants and how they compare with the fungicide.
RNA sprayers can have many advantages over recent pesticides. Microbes break down RNA in the soil within a few days, reducing the risk of environmental degradation. And because RNA sprays affect all kinds of genes, there is — in particular — very little chance that some species will catch fire. Even the two most common genes have enough genetic variation so that it is possible to make RNA sprays that target one virus and leave the other alone, said Clauvis NT Taning, a post-doctoral researcher who studies RNAi antibiotics at Ghent in Belgium.