AgroSpheres, a startup dedicated to transforming agriculture through reliable and affordable bio-based solutions, is working to develop the next generation of crop protection products to replace toxic and environmentally harmful chemicals used in food production. To do this the company is developing minicells that will encapsulate, deliver, and increase the effectiveness of fungicides and pesticides. Through this encapsulation process they aim to reduce the quantity of compounds that farmers need to apply to protect crops. 

The core team at AgroSpheres comes from University of Virginia where they worked together. Bioengineering in agriculture is nothing new, but as Ameer Shakeel, AgroSpheres’ CEO, notes, “Often the problem is that the GMO label limits public adoption and often commercial viability of some of these products.”   

The company is looking to develop a technology for delivering environmentally benign biological pesticides, both peptides and small RNA using their minicells. “We already have some great data on that front. The AgroSphere technology produces and encapsulates these ingredients for greater stability and longer effective lives in field conditions. By themselves, unencapsulated in the field may not be effective enough to compete with existing pesticide chemicals,” said Ameer Shakeel, AgroSpheres’ CEO.

Through the Wells Fargo Foundation Innovation Incubator (IN²), AgroSpheres has been paired with two Principal Investigators at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Dilip Shah, PhD, associate member, and Kirk Czymmek, PhD, director, Advanced Bioimaging Laboratory, who will test the delivery and mode of action of two different biological pesticides, peptides and small RNAs, encapsulated in AgroSpheres' minicells. 

Shah and his collaborators at the Danforth Center have identified a number of potent antifungal peptides that the project will encapsulate into AgroSpheres minicells and test against plant fungal pathogens.  Czymmek will use bioimaging to explore how the minicells and their cargos interact with plant cells.  The unique team of scientists with expertise in synthetic biology, fungal and plant cell biology combined with advanced imaging capabilities is poised to deliver on its promise of providing bio-based solutions for hardworking farmers everywhere.

“The Danforth Center has a strong reputation for being the leaders in plant biology and we’re confident that the expertise of the scientists we’re working with will truly leverage the best attributes of our technology and enable us to gain an understanding that we wouldn’t have been able to, had we tackled this on our own,” said Shakeel. “The AgroSpheres team is excited to work with the Danforth Center as well as the other innovators in the IN² program.”