Corteva Agriscience and MicroMGx formed a collaboration that aims to provide farmers with a wider range of novel, microbial-based crop protection products.

Under the agreement, MicroMGx will apply its metabologenomics platform to accelerate the identification of new natural product starting points. In a first for the agriculture industry, Corteva will use those starting points to discover and develop naturally derived crop protection solutions. Metabologenomics modernizes natural product discovery by fusing genomics and mass-spectrometry data in a way that facilitates more targeted molecule identification.

MicroMGx, established in 2015, is a life sciences company dedicated to making high-throughput natural product discovery achievable. Through MicroMGx, pharmaceutical, animal health and agricultural companies will have easy access to new natural products to fill their discovery pipelines. The MicroMGx laboratory is located at the University Technology Park at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Farmers worldwide already rely on products developed by Corteva using spinosyns -- active ingredients produced by naturally fermenting soil bacteria -- to protect crops from insect damage. The newest of these is Inatreq active, an active ingredient that helps control fungus in wheat and bananas.

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“With 20-plus years of leadership in green chemistry, Corteva Agriscience has a long and successful track record of discovering natural and naturally derived products,” said Neal Gutterson, Corteva Agriscience senior vice president and chief technology officer. “We are excited to collaborate with MicroMGx to explore novel approaches for speeding up the process of discovering the next generation of innovative crop protection solutions.”

“We believe in our platform’s potential to uncover impactful new crop protection products. We’re enthusiastic to be partnering with Corteva Agriscience because of their strong portfolio of natural and naturally derived products,” MicroMGx chief scientific officer Anthony Goering said.

MicroMGx is part of a Midwest collaboration to bring exciting new technology to the world’s crop protection industry. Its metabologenomics platform was developed through a collaboration between research groups at Northwestern University’s Chemistry of Life Processes Institute and the University of Illinois’ Institute for Genomic Biology.