Is slime holding your crops back, leaving them with toxic residue?
Does it make your cattle harder to treat for disease?
The answer is yes, but Calgary researchers are working on solutions.
Many plant and animal diseases depend on slimy coatings to protect them from the environment and human intervention.
Slime, or biofilm as scientists call it, acts as a barrier to attacks on some bacteria and fungi. Fusarium and mastitis are examples of diseases that use slimy biofilm to protect themselves. Even dental plaque is a product of organisms using biofilm.
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Biofilm is created when large numbers of the organisms get together and form on solid or semi-porous surfaces.
This strength in numbers makes bacteria and fungi much harder to treat than lone individuals, said Lyriam Marques, a researcher with Innovotech in Calgary who has been working on a project to solve the problem of fusarium head blight in cereals.
“Fusarium is so hard to treat,” she said. “Products that are now available to fight the disease are subject to tiny application windows that rely on fully even crop maturity and application conditions across an entire field or farm.”
Marques said fusarium can be controlled in the lab with a variety of substances, but it can be difficult to control when it accumulates as a group with a biofilm.
“Even when you do apply a product, you often don’t get everything, so you have reoccurrence or just reduce the damage rather than control it entirely,” she said.
The company’s research is taking a two-pronged approach: surface treatments that make it difficult for biofilm to establish and products that break down the slimy armour so that fungicides and antibiotics can be more effective.
“We are working on products and strategies that can be used on pulse crops, cereals and potatoes,” she said.
“It’s a new frontier of microbiology, with agriculture and human health in the forefront.”
Diseases that significantly reduce yield and quality often rely on biofilm for protection.
Bacterial blight in beans and potato ring rot are two problems for which Innovotech feels it will have solutions.
The Manitoba government estimates the annual cost of fusarium to its farmers is $50 to $110 million. Canadian seed potato growers who are found to have the disease on their potatoes can lose their seed sales licence for five years.
Research into human diseases will have many transferable opportunities for livestock. The company is working on the problems of antibiotic resistant bacteria in hospitals and disease treatment in livestock.
“Our head of research is a (doctor of veterinary medicine),” Marques said. “He is very interested in what we can do for livestock.”
“Useful (livestock) drugs like streptomycin may be phased out due to resistance that develops from heavy use. For drugs like that, if we might now need 100 milligrams to treat a disease with a biofilm, we might need only five milligrams if we can break down the slime first,” she said.
Marques said her company hopes to have products ready for the market in the next five years, with some available as soon as 2008.
“The challenge is the wide variety of diseases, surfaces and application conditions involved.”
The researcher said no one product or strategy will be the answer and it will take a combination of approaches to keep the slime out of producers’ wallets.
