California Ag Network

Tag: AFRI

  • New Nanoparticle-Based Sensors to Measure Residual Herbicides in Food

    Two newly developed, low-cost tests that use nanoparticles to detect chemicals can accurately measure tiny amounts of two potentially harmful herbicides in fruits, vegetables and their products.

    Reporting in the journal Food Chemistry, a Washington State University research team used two testing methods to measure the levels of two herbicides, namely atrazine and acetochlor, in samples of apples, strawberries, cabbage, corn and fruit juices. The work shows the real-world viability of their easy-to-use and inexpensive methods of testing.

    “We applied this technology for real sample detection – which is an important step in moving towards commercialization,” said Annie Du, research professor in WSU’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and the principle investigator of the project.

    Annie Du

    The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regularly tests a broad range of commodities for approximately 800 pesticide residues, and producers are required to keep the chemical residues on food below a certain level that is considered safe. The two herbicides the researchers measured are widely used in crop production in the U.S. At high exposures, they are potentially toxic for people and have been linked to a range of maladies from allergies to hormone disruption to cancer.

    Doing the testing, however, currently requires sophisticated and expensive instruments as well as a trained technician.

    “We want to come up with a low-cost method that can be used in the field or in the laboratory,” said Bernie Van Wie, corresponding author on the paper and a professor in WSU’s Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering.

    Bernie Van Wie

    In the past few years, the researchers have developed and patented their idea that uses nanoparticles of palladium and platinum to amplify the signal of molecules. The nanoparticles attach to an antibody, which recognizes the chemical, and then stimulate the production of a signal.  The amplification allows the researchers to know that tiny amounts of the chemicals are present and at what level.

    In this latest work, the researchers used the nanoparticles in two types of tests to measure two chemicals simultaneously. The chemicals were spiked into fruit and vegetable samples that were pureed in a blender.

    One of the tests uses the palladium-platinum nanoparticles to catalyze a reaction that causes a color change in a sample when the herbicide is present. The test can be done using a small unit that can be carried into the field.  The other test the researchers developed uses the nanoparticle in a low-cost paper strip that looks like a COVID-19 or pregnancy test and can be read with a smartphone reader.

    The tests were sensitive enough to measure the chemicals down to the maximum acceptable levels and were validated using traditional testing methods.

    “We’re actually able to detect below the maximum concentration limits. If there’s any pesticide or herbicide in the sample,” said Van Wie. “That’s good because while this can be done by other methods, this method is low-cost and portable in the field.”

    Du has recently started a company that is negotiating with WSU’s Office of Commercialization to license the technology for additional applications. The work was supported by the USDA/National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program (grant number 2018-67021-27970). — By Tina Hilding, Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture, Washington State University

  • Virginia Tech Researchers Developing New Vaccine for a Swine Coronavirus

    To address climbing economic losses from swine that contract the porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, Virginia Tech researchers in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine are developing a vaccine to combat the disease that has a near 100 percent mortality rate in newborn piglets.

    The disease emerged in the United States in 2013 and has since caused around $600 million in annual losses to swine producers. When combined with increased food prices for consumers and decreased exports of hogs, the associated loss amounts to more than $900 million annually in the U.S.

    While there are two commercially available vaccines for the virus commonly known as PEDv, neither are effective in preventing the disease. Mike Zhang, the principal investigator of the project and a professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering and Turner Faculty Fellow, saw the urgency for an effective vaccine against this virus.

    With a four-year, $630,000 grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Zhang and co-principal investigator X.J. Meng, a University Distinguished Professor of molecular virology in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, are researching a nanoparticle-based vaccine to curb this highly contagious coronavirus among swine.

    Because of PEDv being in the coronavirus family, the researchers hope to gain knowledge and insight in order to swiftly produce vaccines against human coronaviruses and their variants.

    “This project will give us the opportunity not only to development a vaccine for swine, but gain insight into coronaviruses,” Zhang said. “While the viruses are different from each other, they share a lot of similarities. A lot of things that we learn from this project can be used to develop vaccines against human coronaviruses in the future.”

    Meng, also a professor of internal medicine at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, the director of the Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, and Arthropod-borne Pathogens, and the interim director of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute, lent his help with his renowned knowledge as a virologist.

    “PEDv is one of the most devastating illnesses in the swine industry,” Zhang said. “Right now, we don’t have a good mitigation method. We want a safe and reliable tool in the arsenal of those in industry and our research will lead to that.”

    Over the last few years, vaccine development has targeted a safer, more effective way to deliver an immune response. So far, that target has landed on nanoparticle-based vaccines, to safely deliver a strong immune response in hosts to protect against disease.

    With the combination of nanotechnology and immunology work, the researchers targeted this delivery platform to develop nanoparticles displaying viral proteins as a vaccine candidate. The nanoparticle allows the researchers to put molecular adjuvant inside the particle, allowing it to become more potent.

    “Once you decorate the nanoparticle with viral proteins, the nanoparticle looks like a virus particle,” Zhang said. “Once you give that to the animal, it can have a very strong immune response toward the viral proteins on the nanoparticle to protect the vaccinated animals from the invading virus.”

    This platform has been used for other vaccines, and the researchers thought that because of its success elsewhere, it would be a good candidate for their PEDv vaccine.

    With the nanoparticle platform, the immune response can last quite a long time once injected into the subject. The initial shot could last as long as six months with a booster needed to complete the vaccine series – a common practice among vaccines of varying delivery platforms.

    “If we formulate the nanoparticle well, the immunity the vaccine can provide protection for is around half a year,” Zhang said. “But we have not tested beyond that duration using the nanoparticle delivery platform. It’s an extremely important subject to tackle.

    “This is a good duration to target,” Zhang continued, “because a body really doesn’t need a lot of antibodies circulating to provide a good immune response.”

    With the continued support of the Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, and Arthropod-borne Pathogens, the Fralin Life Sciences Institute, and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the researchers have cutting-edge technology to tackle current and future viruses in animals of all species. 

    This project is supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, AFRI project (#2021-08581).

  • $650,000 Grant to Study Wild Wheat to Help Prevent Diseases

    The 2Blades Foundation and collaborators at the University of Minnesota, Kansas State University, and the John Innes Center will study wild emmer wheat to discover genes that can help farmers combat devastating wheat rust diseases which are estimated to cost farmers and consumers nearly $3 billion each year.

    The United States Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture has awarded a grant through their Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) for the study of emmer wheat — one of the very first cereals to be cultivated in agriculture — to identify genes that could help make wheat resistant to “rust” diseases.  Wheat rusts have destroyed crops since Roman times, including multiple epidemics in the US in the past century.

    The current project builds on 2Blades’ 12-year effort to source resistance genes from wheat and its domesticated and wild relatives, and to deploy them in finished wheat varieties. It brings together leading scientists in wheat and wheat rusts with key resources.

    The project team includes:  Jesse Poland, a wheat geneticist at Kansas State University’s Wheat Genetics Resource Center, which maintains extensive collections of wild wheat relatives including wild emmer wheat; Brian Steffenson, a plant pathologist at the University of Minnesota, with extensive expertise in cereal rusts and specialized facilities for conducting resistance assays; and Brande Wulff, from the John Innes Centre in the United Kingdom, who has developed the methodology to quickly identify resistance genes through association genetics.

    Wheat provides roughly 20 percent of calories and protein for human nutrition worldwide and is the third largest crop grown in the United States. It is attacked by a number of diseases, among the most damaging being stripe rust (Puccinia striiformis), stem rust (P. graminis), and leaf rust (P. triticina).

    The best and most environmentally sound way to defend against these diseases is through the deployment of resistance genes in wheat varieties. The use of genetic resistance is particularly important in developing countries where fungicides used to combat rust disease may be expensive or unavailable.

    The world wheat harvest is threatened by the recent emergence of new virulent forms of the fungal pathogen Puccinia graminis, which can cause pandemic disease with the rapid and complete destruction of infected crops.

    “In the face of this threat to world food security we are working with our partners in the United States, England, Australia and Japan to develop new wheat lines which are completely and securely disease resistant, and to ensure that these lines are available to farmers everywhere, and freely available to farmers throughout the developing world,” said 2Blades Chairman Roger Freedman.

    Read More at 2Blades.org

  • Nitrogen-Efficient Fertilizer Research Could Have Lasting Impact

    The world’s population will continue to grow, but the amount of arable land to feed that population will not.

    “So people will continue to add more fertilizers to grow more crops in the same areas,” says Jonas Baltrusaitis, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering in Lehigh University’s P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, and a recipient of the 2020 ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering Lectureship Award. “You can’t grow crops without fertilizer. It’s just not happening.”

    While a boon to harvests, fertilizers exact a toll on the environment. Their production alone is extremely energy intensive and a significant source of greenhouse gases, and when nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus aren’t fully taken up by plants, they can leach into groundwater and wash into waterways. Excess nutrients can cause eutrophication of water bodies where algal blooms deprive the ecosystem of oxygen, killing wildlife and producing toxins that can harm humans.

    It’s a vicious cycle that Baltrusaitis hopes to one day break. He recently received a four-year, nearly $435,000 grant through the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) for his proposal, “Mechanochemical Synthesis of Nitrogen Efficient Fertilizer Materials.”

    NIFA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) is the leading competitive grants program for agricultural sciences in the United States. According to NIFA, “AFRI-funded science is vital to meeting food, fiber, and fuel demands as the world’s population races toward a projected 9 billion by 2050 concomitant with diminishing land and water resources and increasingly variable climatic conditions.”

    Baltrusaitis’ team has developed a dry mechanochemical synthesis method of a family of urea ionic cocrystals that can serve as functional fertilizers that significantly slow down urea hydrolysis in soil, reduce ammonia emissions, and extend availability of nitrogen to plants. He is combining water soluble urea with various nutrients containing low solubility minerals or even industrial waste, such as drywall gypsum, to improve nitrogen management efficiency.

    “We’re re-designing fertilizer materials to be much more stable in the environment,” he says. “If they don’t decompose as fast, they’re available to the plant for longer, so those nutrients are going into the food chain rather than being wasted and damaging the environment.”

    The potential impact is global, and the technology is being developed to be easily inserted into existing supply chains, says Baltrusaitis. His ultimate goal is to design nitrogen-efficient novel fertilizer materials that can be used in field trials with local Pennsylvania farmers, where his team can test improvements in yields and emissions.

    Coming from the USDA, the award is a unique one for Lehigh, he says.

    “And it’s one that will help educate the next generation of engineers as they prepare to address emerging global challenges.

    About Jonas Baltrusaitis

    ChBE researcher Jonas Baltrusaitis is “breaking the cycle.” His USDA-funded research aims to make fertilizer more effective for crop growth and less destructive for the environment.

    Jonas Baltrusaitis is an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Lehigh University. He holds a PhD in physical chemistry from the University of Iowa, where he conducted postdoctoral research and served in numerous roles, including adjunct assistant professor and associate director of the Central Microscopy Research Facility. He was an assistant professor of chemical engineering at the University of Twente (the Netherlands) before joining the faculty of the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science in 2014.

    Baltrusaitis’ research interests span numerous areas of sustainable catalytic conversion, including: natural gas component catalytic conversion to high value products, biomass catalytic upgrading, sustainable sulfur and phosphorus processing, renewable energy utilization in wastewater processing, low concentration organic wastewater stream treatment, emerging contaminant remediation and environmental catalysis, surface sensitive spectroscopies, and data processing method development.

    His research has been funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance, Defense Logistics Agency, and Department of Defense, among others. His work has been published in high-impact journals such as the Journal of American Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, ACS Catalysis, Applied Catalysis B: Environmental, and Chemical Communications.

    Baltrusaitis is a member of the American Chemical Society and AIChE and received a 2020 ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering Lectureship Award for his work in advanced materials science and supramolecular chemistry, applying concepts of sustainable chemistry and engineering to the delivery of more sustainable fertilizers and nutrients.

    At Lehigh, Baltrusaitis has been recognized with the university’s Libsch Early Career Research Award (Spring 2018) as well as a P.C. Rossin Assistant Professorship (2017-2019). He currently directs the chemical engineering M.Eng. distance education program and advises numerous PhD students.