Strengthening Food Security: Integrating Biotech, Autonomous Experimentation & Computational Modeling to Improve Agriculture

Chemical nitrogen fertilizers have become a critical component for agriculture production. However, they have important drawbacks including negative water supply impact from eutrophication, demand on power grids, reduction of soil health, & reliance on global supply chain. Additionally, they are marginally effective at delivering nutrients as 50% and 70% of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers respectively are either lost to runoff or to the air. A solution is needed to sustain agriculture as the global population increases while eliminating these drawbacks from chemical fertilizers & that is where microbial communities that are enhanced can start to provide this solution. Yet, enhancing microbial communities by adding biofertilizers or biostimulants (microbes or molecules that stimulate plant performance/resilience) to increase plant performance & soil health has been problematically inconsistent due to poor persistence in soil, unknown impact on the soil microbiome, and variation between plant hosts leading to low adoption by growers especially in the US. Accordingly, our efforts began by developing a high-throughput, automation-compatible pipeline for testing how a BF might persist with, improve, or disrupt soil microbial communities. Ultimately, we aim to create synergy amongst high-throughput experimentation, biotechnology, and computational modeling to more rationally disentangle the complexity of agriculture for improved food security, soil health, & sustainability.