Oliver Loiseleur, Senior Team Leader at Syngenta, highlighted the company’s research in biologicals and biomolecules, including work on fungicides, nematode control, insecticides, and the use of plant and microbial extracts for crop protection.
Biologicals are a rapidly growing market, expected to represent 20% of crop protection products by 2030. The main drivers behind this growth are food chain pressures, regulatory changes like the EU Green Deal, resistance issues, and climate change.
Loiseleur explained that natural products hold a great deal of innovative potential; natural products derived from microbes and plants offer high selectivity and potency. Advances in microbiology, fermentation, and bioinformatics facilitate drug discovery and development. Furthermore, their unique structural qualities correlate with novel target spaces in agriculture and pharmaceuticals.
Next, Loiseleur highlighted a case study on Zorafen, a polyketide with antifungal properties, to show how synthetic chemistry is used to modify natural products. The team relied on a linchpin strategy to create analogues and used halogenation techniques to explore modifications at specific molecular sites.
Machine learning was applied to optimise enzyme variants for selective chlorination, which in turn significantly reduced the number of experiments needed. Then the modified compounds were tested against economically relevant plant pathogens, showing promising results in leaf disc and liquid culture assays.
