What Did COVID Teach Us about Preparing for a Plant Pandemic?

The menace of infectious disease has never been more apparent. Plants could be struck by the next Pandemic. The COVID Pandemic offers important lessons for how we should prepare for agricultural diseases.

There are plant diseases that can be very dangerous. Banana plantations in Central and South America were destroyed in the 1950s due to Panama disease. Panama Disease is a disease caused by a fungus. The wind, rain and soil carry the tiny particles from Panama to South America.

Climate change and global trade are speeding up the spread of sphenes. Plants haven't developed resistance to storms and other extreme weather. Modern farming increases susceptibility to infections.

Control of plant diseases can be accomplished with effective solutions. Joyn Bio is a company that works in the field of biologicals, where we engineer naturally occurring microbes to create high performance biopesticides and biofertility products.

New control strategies are required for plant diseases to change quickly. The introduction of the Cavendish banana variety was able to defeat Panama disease. The banana industry is threatened by a variant of the disease that can now affect these plants.

Plants are vulnerable to breakthrough pathogens. The past years have shown the importance of preparing.

We can learn from the success of COVID-19 vaccine development by building upon a solid scientific foundation. Moderna was able to produce its vaccine prototype days after access to the viral genome sequence because of existing research and new technologies.

We don't have a framework to quickly develop solutions to emerging threats in agriculture. It will be too late if we don't build the framework now.

Because of the evolution of antibiotic resistance inbacteria, novel treatments are necessary and our best bet is to identify threatening "superbugs" then prototype new antibiotics before they break out.

The majority of plant diseases are caused by fungi. In the event of a breakthrough, existing fungicides and plant-breeding techniques are useless. It can take a decade or more to develop a new solution.

There are opportunities to advance synthetic biology in the future. New fungicidal modes of action are being worked on at Joyn Bio. Live microbes to biological chemistries are just a few of the solutions that comprise biofungicides. We can use proven tools to discover and develop new treatments in this area.

Synthetic biology tools and genetic engineering give us the ability to identify safe and effective biofungicides.

This model can be used to create a rapid-response strategy.

• Pretesting for safety and efficacy: We can speed the transition from laboratory to field by focusing on general categories that are known or likely to have very low safety risks for humans and the environment. One approach is to deliver biofungicides to crops via pretested hosts (such as harmless bacteria). Another is to use proteins or RNA that only target a specific fungal species and then rapidly degrade in the environment. Of course, another big learning from COVID-19 is the importance of education and communication to enable the societal acceptance of new technologies.
• Establish libraries for rapid screening and optimization: Genetic libraries have been fundamental to synthetic biology innovation because they permit the rapid construction and evaluation of diverse populations of genetic variants. The same framework applies to biofungicides; we can screen thousands to millions of variants to identify and optimize those that selectively interfere with a given pathogen. Once we know that a specific agent can disrupt a disease, we can develop the means to deliver the solution, whether it’s through an engineered microbe (as we are doing at Joyn Bio) or biomolecules like RNA (pursued by GreenLight Biosciences) and proteins (such as Biotalys’ antibody technology).
• Scalable production using standardizing manufacturing and delivery systems: Biotechnology offers the opportunity to rapidly prototype and scale the production of biofungicides using standard manufacturing systems. Thanks to inexpensive, large-scale production and shelf-stable formulations, we can rapidly transition laboratory solutions out to the field for evaluation and application.

The question isn't whether we'll experience a plant Pandemic but whether we'll be prepared. A platform that can be quickly scaled and deployed in an emergency is needed to protect crops.

We can take steps to prepare for diseases on keystone crops, even though we can't protect every plant from every pathogen. We can either build our boat today or wait for the crisis to happen. Today's technologies and capabilities are still present. We have the ability to deploy them or not.