How can imaging help us make better Crop Protection products?

Session

Poster Session Three

Authors

Giovambattista Depietra (1), Jean-Yves Mugnier (1), Mark Johnston (1)

Affiliations

1. Syngenta Crop Protection

Keywords

Crop Protection - In situ Imaging

Abstract text

Developing new crop protection products (herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides) is becoming an increasingly long and expensive process. There is a diminishing area of chemistry to explore and requirements for product safety mean many products fail during development. This combined with the increased levels of resistance and the removal of various existing products due to more stringent regulatory requirements (particularly in Europe) means fewer options for farmers in the field. To maintain a pipeline of products and increase their success in development requires many different areas of research including understanding fundamental biology to identify novel targets, the development of experiments to identify modes of action and mechanisms of resistance, and the development of high through-put assays to identify new compound candidates. Historically, for plant research, these areas have been heavily focused on biochemical and symptomology-based assays due to the limitations of imaging plants compared to mammalian cells, fungi, and insects. However, advances in imaging technology mean that image-based approaches could become a major component of the development pathway. The holy grail of this approach would be the ability to image a whole plant and observe the flow of a compound from the contact point on the leaf or roots through the plant to the points of effect or target sites. With this you can start to understand the barriers to entry of a product, why some have a localised and others a systemic effect, and start to tailor compounds to target specific areas of the plant. Of course, there are still many technical limitations that need to be overcome from sample preparation, optical limitations when imaging through thick layers, autofluorescence, lack of contrast (especially for compound localisation due to a lack of suitable markers), and the ability to convert the imaging to a high-throughput approach. However, even if this cannot be achieved yet there are many avenues to explore with image-based approaches in plant research. For example, better ways to observe the effect of compounds from germination through to mature plants, the interaction of plant pests, such as fungi, with plants to better understand infection routes, the development of high-throughput assays to identify specific targets either in a plant, leaf cutting, or cell-based approach and many more. We do a lot of development work in this area and we are always keen to discuss with academia about possible new opportunities to develop our imaging techniques and approaches further. Therefore, this abstract and poster are hoped to spark conversations and discussions about ideas that could be useful and possibly develop cooperative projects to explore them further.