Brazil has registered Phytalix, a biofungicide from the US company Ascribe Bio, which the company announced on 29 September as the first time any government has registered an ascaroside-based crop protection product. It is labelled for Asian soybean rust, target spot and septoria in soybean, and for white spot and southern corn leaf blight in corn, and is described as Brazil's first biological product registered against southern corn leaf blight.
Ascarosides are small signalling molecules that soil nematodes produce, and they can trigger defence responses in nearby plants. Ascribe Bio, which grew out of natural-products research at the University of Florida, isolates and applies them. Instead of attacking the fungus, Phytalix primes the crop's own defences before infection, which the company compares to a vaccine.
That matters because most fungicides poison the pathogen through one biochemical target, and repeated use lets fungi evolve resistance. Asian soybean rust in Brazil has already become resistant to several major fungicide classes, and the company argues its product offers a rotation option that does not add to that pressure.
Ascribe Bio says the product has been tested in more than 1,000 field trials worldwide, but the data have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal and remain company-reported. Chief executive Jay Farmer said Brazilian growers "need sustainable disease control options without additional complexity."
Photo: Tiago Fioreze / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: Global Agriculture
Comments
(0)