Innovation Anthology #447:
Bacterial biofilms cause a lot of disease in agricultural crops.
Current practice often includes treatments with antibiotics like streptomycin. But this is falling out of favour.
As Dr. Patricia Nadworny of Innovotech explains, her company is developing an alternative treatment based on silver.
DR. PATRICIA NADWORNY: A lot of agricultural crops right now are being treated either with streptomycin which is being banned in a lot of places or the bacteria are actually developing resistance to the streptomycin. Another problem is there are some diseases in the plants that just there is no treatment for them right now. And so in order to prevent the infections from spreading, they actually end up having to destroy the crop. And so that’s very wasteful, and coming at a time when we have less and less agricultural land use and more people to feed
So the one compound that we’ve developed, it is a high valency silver compound. It’s showing good promise as a seed treatment but also as a foliar spray And what I’ve been working on is developing a package to have it registered with the Environmental Protection Agency for those applications.
According to Dr. Patricia Nadworny, the agricultural use of silver does not pose a threat to humans.
Thanks today to Alberta Innovates Technology Futures
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
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Program Date: 2012-01-12