News

By Steve Byrns, Texas A&M AgriLife Communications

COLLEGE STATION – Today’s news is flooded with reports on Zika; none of them good…until now.

Texas A&M AgriLife Research has fielded a Zika team led by two scientists who joined the department of entomology at Texas A&M University on Aug. 1, said Dr. David Ragsdale, department head at College Station.

Dr. Zach Adelman and Dr. Kevin Myles were previously at Virginia Tech and now join the ranks of a number of AgriLife Research personnel whose priority has become stopping Zika, he said.

“Dr. Adelman and Dr. Myles are longtime collaborators who have joined us here in College Station. Both men have earned world-renowned reputations for their work on viruses.

“Dr. Myles is working to understand the basic biology of how these viruses replicate in mosquitoes, while one of Dr. Adelman’s projects involves creating mosquitoes that are resistant to viruses such as Zika.”

The pair’s work will take mosquito management where it has never been before, Ragsdale said.

“They will address the mosquito and disease relationship in ways not previously considered,” he said. “Like all discovery science at the very edges of what we know, the outcomes are uncertain, but the potential for development of technologies that revolutionize mosquito and disease management is very real.”

Adelman said one of his primary goals is to develop new genetic technologies to help suppress or eliminate Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquito populations locally, nationally and beyond.

“As vectors of dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya and now Zika, it is clear that as long as these mosquitoes are allowed to persist in close proximity to humans, the litany of viruses will only continue to grow, and with it the burden on public health,” he said.

Myles said mosquito-borne diseases continue to cause unacceptable levels of  loss in humans and domesticated animals and that globalization is increasingly blurring the traditional boundaries of these diseases.

“West Nile virus, first introduced in a 1999 outbreak in New York City, is now prevalent throughout the U.S.,” Myles said. “A more recent example is the emergence of Zika virus in Micronesia and the South Pacific with subsequent spread to the Americas.

“Pathogens like these are transmitted to humans when the virus is able to overcome the immune defenses of a mosquito vector. Thus, a primary focus of my laboratory is on understanding this process, with the goal of using this information to develop new genetic control strategies and novel vaccines.”

Intense media attention has made Zika a household word to many Texans. The mosquito-transmitted Zika virus is a serious threat to the health of unborn babies. Women infected by the virus while pregnant are known to have babies with microcephaly, a condition where the fetal brain and head do not fully develop and reach normal size.

A. aegypti and A. albopictus, the mosquitoes capable of transmitting Zika, occur commonly in residential areas where they use even small amounts of standing water to reproduce, Ragsdale said. Aedes mosquitoes infected with Zika are hard to detect, so health officials will have to rely on actual human cases to identify hot spots once the virus arrives in native mosquito populations.

“We’re now seeing media reports of confirmed Zika cases stemming from homegrown mosquitoes in Florida,” he said. “There have been a number of cases reported in Texas, but those were related to foreign travel, so confirmation of Zika in native mosquito populations is a concern our scientists are urgently seeking to thwart.”

Ragsdale noted that as of this writing, there have been no known cases of Zika stemming from native mosquito populations in Texas.

“This is an insidious virus because people can have it and never know it,” Ragsdale said.

He said some travelers to Zika-infested countries are unknowingly coming home infected with the virus. When Aedes mosquitoes bite infected people, the insects acquire the virus. The mosquito then bites another person, transmitting the virus to that previously uninfected person.

“As it stands now, the best defense is to keep from getting bitten by mosquitoes both here and abroad, although that’s a pretty tall order for most outdoor-loving Texans.

“Soon though, it is our hope the energy and knowledge these two researchers bring to our top team of AgriLife Research entomologists will result in scientific breakthroughs in ridding the country of the Zika virus and quite possibly other mosquito-borne diseases as well.”

by Steve Byrns, Texas A&M AgriLife Communications

COLLEGE STATION—The dream of many Texas cotton farmers plagued by dwindling irrigation water and drought might be to someday produce more fiber using the same amount of water.

That dream is fast becoming reality now thanks to a commercially available seed treatment from Indigo Ag called Indigo™ Cotton. The science behind the treatment stems directly from research started by Dr. Greg Sword, a Texas A&M entomologist.

But the dream gets better.

Sword and Indigo-his industry partner-say that under some conditions the production or yield can be as much as 10 percent higher than untreated crops and needs no special crop management inputs beyond a simple endophyte microbial coating of the planting seed.

Endophytes are microbes that can live inside plants, analogous to the microbes that live inside humans and play important roles in human health.

That means no specialized farming equipment is required, no genetically modified organism technology is associated with the process, no more acreage is taken into account, there’s no need for increased planting rates, and no additional pesticides or fertilizer applications need be applied over what’s normally used, Sword said.

In fact, Sword’s lab has shown that some endophytes can reduce pest pressure on cotton as well. In short, the process means more profit for the producer with no added stress on the environment.

“As an entomologist, my first research initially focused on the important effects microbes could have in conferring resistance in cotton to insects and nematodes and potentially affect cotton yields in that way,” Sword said. “But I also started to suspect that water stress was involved, and we conducted field trials showing increased yields were possible. This is what started getting the early attention from industry in 2012-2013.”

Now, there are 50,000 acres planted with the Indigo™ Cotton treated with a microbe from Sword’s lab – most of it in the High Plains of Texas. This part of Texas, often called “The World’s Largest Cotton Patch,” is the most intense area of cotton production in the U.S. and sits over the huge, but slowly dwindling Ogallala Aquifer.

In 2013, Texas A&M AgriLife Research, with assistance from Texas A&M Technology Commercialization, inked an exclusive licensing deal with Indigo to have the rights to commercialize the fungal endophytes that Sword’s lab collected from cotton.

“Through joint research with Indigo, we began to find that many of the microbes I collected were also having effects in conferring water stress resistance,” Sword said.

Sword said that it was his early work that clearly showed the microbes could be applied to seeds that could then be planted under normal field conditions with observable effects on plant performance and yields.

Indigo has raised close to $156 million in private investment funding so far, with $100 million of that from the most recent round of fundraising, as noted by reports in the media, Sword said.

“That made a big splash because it was the largest private equity fundraising effort ever in the agricultural technology sector to date,” Sword said. “So not only are the ag people paying attention now, but so are the finance/Wall Street types.

“Although Indigo’s first product is in cotton and based on a microbe from my lab, they have lots of other developments going on with other microbes in other crops,” Sword said. “But the cotton data was promising enough that it led to their first commercial offering being for cotton, and the strength of the cotton data surely helped them convince investors to invest. So it’s not exclusively due to the cotton data, but it definitely helped.”

So why should non-farmers care?

“Because producing more food and fiber with less water, or even producing the same amount with less water, is a critical global need as water becomes scarce and droughts become more common and widespread,” Sword said. “It is my hope that our partnership with Indigo is a strong start to a new kind of green revolution, where considerably more food and fiber can be produced without further taxing the water supply or environment.”