VATIS UPDATE Article

A new undergraduate-led company at the University of Virginia, the United States, has a solution for common pesticide problem in agriculture. “Agrospheres” is a bioengineering start-up that has created a solution that can be sprayed on pesticide-treated plants to safely and rapidly remove potentially harmful pesticide residue. The spray is created from “mini cells,” microscopic biologic platforms that deliver pesticide-degrading enzymes. It makes plants safer for workers to handle and allows farmers more control over their harvest time.

“What we mean by a ‘platform’ is that the technology we’re using is a spherical bio-particle we’re attaching enzymes to. Essentially it’s just a carrier that can be modified to work with different enzymes for different purposes, from degrading pesticides to breaking down other substances,” fourth-year biomedical engineering major Ameer Shakeel said. Shakeel helped co-found Agrospheres with 2016 graduate Payam Pourtaheri while they were both still students in UVA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

They began working with UVA pharmacology professor Mark Kester as their adviser and eventual co-founder as they considered applications for the mini cell platform. “The majority of that organism is going to divide into one identical organism and a tiny remaining percentage of the organism is going to divide into what we call the mini cell. The mini cell that we get is just a sack without the genetic material of the original organism. It’s like a package, but in that package we’ve got the one enzyme we want expressed,” said Kester.