January 16, 2025

Challenge: Novel Solutions for Fungal Nucleic Acid Extraction

3 min read

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Plants’ fungal pathogens influence agriculture around the world by decreasing crop yields and increasing the sum of fungicides to sustain crop general performance. At Corteva Agriscience, we goal to develop efficient, sustainable, and tough solutions to defend plants from fungal pathogens, permitting us to give farmers with remarkable solutions maximizing their return.

The key to this goal is to produce new and enhanced ways to finding out and detecting fungal pathogens. In convert, this demands the layout of novel methods for the simultaneous extraction of nucleic acids from pathogens and their hosts.

DNA extraction – illustrative photograph. Graphic credit score:Joo Nath/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.

This is an Ideation Challenge with a guaranteed award for at the very least 1 submitted resolution.

Overview

Comprehending the features of fungal genomes and detecting fungal pathogens with nucleic acid-based molecular approaches is essential to our capacity to boost plant illness administration. A vital move in this system is the extraction of the pathogen’s nucleic acids from contaminated vegetation.

Sad to say, several important fungal species are recalcitrant to the extraction of high-high quality nucleic acids. To make improvements to the foundational understanding of plant pathogens, Corteva Agriscience invitations experts from both of those community and private sectors to be a part of our attempts to build new and improved methods to at the same time extract nucleic acids from fungal pathogens and their plant hosts.

Submissions to this Challenge will have to be received by 11:59 PM (US Jap Time) on March 19, 2023. 

Supply: InnoCentive



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Supply url Fungi represent some of the most diverse species on the planet, making them increasingly important targets in the exploration of new treatments and medicines. However, extracting their valuable nucleic acids, such as DNA and RNA, still presents a significant challenge to researchers. Fortunately, a significant effort of innovation and research is being dedicated towards creating novel solutions for this problem.

One of the primary methods still used for fungal nucleic acid extraction is the use of hazardous chemicals, but this approach has severe drawbacks. As they can be toxic to cells and DNA, they can often produce poor and unreliable results that can hinder the research process. For this reason, there is an ever increasing demand for more efficient and accurate processes that do not involve the use of toxic materials.

In recent years, numerous novel solutions have been suggested in an effort to meet this need. These include the use of less toxic chemicals, bioprocessing techniques, and the usage of physical or enzymatic methods. For example, one method that has been studied is the use of polymeric microbeads to concentrate the fungal DNA. This approach can greatly increase the accuracy and yield of fungal nucleic acid extraction, with minimal side effects on the target sample.

In addition to this, there is also an effort to utilize new technologies in the extraction of fungal nucleic acids. For instance, nanomaterials are being used to absorb and immobilize the DNA, while lasers can be used to isolate and investigate the microorganisms. This allows the researcher to examine the sample more closely, leading to a better understanding of the fungal population and its genetics.

Ultimately, there is still much work to be done in finding new and improved methods for fungal nucleic acid extraction. However, with the increasing rate of innovation and research, novel solutions are quickly being developed that are of great benefit to scientists. By continuing this effort, researchers are now closer than ever to discovering even more accurate and reliable approaches for obtaining the valuable nucleic acids from this fascinating group of organisms.