Opportunities

Background

We have been approached by companies and agricultural producers wanting to scale this technology. These requests have come from across the United States, Europe and Brazil. Demand is particularly strong in agricultural regions in the US and Brazil.

We have also been approached by and are collaborating with research groups in Norway (NORCE and University of Oslo) and Germany (IGB Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries) to apply this technology to marine systems, specifically benthic communities and microplastics.

Soil Pathogen Quantification

Soil borne plant diseases are extremely difficult to diagnose and prevent. Often symptoms only become present aboveground when it is too late. Early warning and detection of soil pests and pathogens could have economic impact both by alerting producers when they have a problem and by verifying that soil pathogens are below economic damage thresholds and that proactive spraying is not needed.

Many of the requests for Soil Pathogen Quantification focus on isolating, counting, and identifying plant parasitic nematodes from large volumes of soil for which the Smart SOD was developed. Using the Smart SOD quantifying soil pathogen levels would allow producers to do high spatio-temporal sampling and proactively identify problem areas before suffering economic damage.

Airbone Pathogen Quantification

Fungal spores can travel great distances on air currents before settling and causing agricultural damages. Spore traps are effective ways at monitoring this movement, but are primarily used by researchers because of the labor intensive nature of assessing spores collected on these traps. Using the Smart SOD for quantification and identification of these collected spores would reduce processing costs by over an order of magnitude. This would allow producers to use air-borne monitoring of spores in near real time and detect when new pathogens arrive on the wind.

Microplastics Assessment

Little is known about the effect of microplastics on human and environmental health, but the presence of microplastics have been detected across the planet in both soils and marine systems. The Smart Sod can rapidly isolate, count, and quantify by size microplastic particles for use in impact assessments and environmental health assays.

Organism Discovery

Estimates put the number of small organisms in soil and marine systems whose properties are known to science at less than 25%. Many of these unknown organisms could have unique properties in areas including drug development, environmental health, toxin filtering, and carbon cycling. The Smart SOD can act as a high-throughput isolation and screening pipeline to extract new, unknown species from soil and marine environments for future study in genomic and pharmaceutical pipelines.

Quantitative Asssesments of Biodiversity & Ecosystem Health

The Smart SOD enables high-throughput assessments of known and unknown organisms in soil and marine environments. The outputs of such assessments are explicit population counts of individual organisms which no other method can currently provide.