Plant Health Care Share Discussion Threads

[wan] 12/9/2018 07:34

More welcome news today with the US launch into corn, which has potential to materially add to sales (given the size of the market), no to mention its the first of a number of product launches.

[cascudi] 08/9/2018 08:11

3 big trades at 2 mind before end day

[wan] 31/8/2018 07:40

Exemplifies what is behind the momentum for biologicals -

Punjab plans to cut pesticides use in basmati rice
By Prashant Krar, ET Bureau|Aug 30, 2018,

Basmati grown in Punjab this year is likely to witness a major reduction in use of pesticides and fungicides that lead to rejection of export consignments from India. Alarmed by hurdles in export of rice from India, the state government is reaching out to farmers through Gurugwaras, public meetings and social media to dissuade use of Acephate, Cabandazim, Thiamethoxam, Tricyclazole and Triazophos—chemicals responsible for higher residue level in rice.

“There will be significant decline in use of hazardous chemicals in rice this year that cause hurdles in exports,” KS Pannu, Commissioner Food and Drug Administration Punjab told ET.

Full story, Economic Times India -

Same theme and another good read, not to mention a growing market -

Aug 19, 2018, 03:00pm
Cannabis Is Creating A Boom For Biological Pesticides

As legal cannabis farms take the spotlight, safer methods of pest control are also taking root in more 'mainstream' agriculture.

With more states enacting medicinal and adult recreational cannabis laws each year, health officials have increasingly warned about the potential hazards of products made from crops treated with certain chemicals. In particular, chemical pesticides have been identified as a threat to cannabis consumers' health, with potential risks that can vary depending on whether products are eaten, smoked, vaped, or topically applied.

Full story, Forbes.Com -

[wan] 28/8/2018 15:21

I meant to include the Safety Data Sheet, which ultimately confirms it's a PHC product -

[wan] 28/8/2018 15:18

I note the following new product launch from a highly respected distributor for PHC's Harpin aB, interestingly it also uses the following description "contains an elicitor that stimulates gene expression in plants, delivering improved abiotic stress tolerance and better plant growth. Elicitors are known to activate a variety of biosynthetic pathways within the plant" -

New E2 Pro Elicitor from Sherriff Amenity
Sherriff Amenity has announced the launch of E2 Pro Elicitor - a new unique soluble plant biostimulant which contains Harpin aβ.

E2 Pro from Sherriff Amenity is a brand of turf care products which is viewed as being synonymous with quality, and the ever expanding portfolio features a range of both high performing water soluble and liquid fertilisers. There are currently five different analyses within the water soluble range and eight in the liquid portfolio, ensuring that there is a solution to suit a wide range of nutrient requirements throughout the year.

Elicitor is the latest product to be welcomed to the E2 Pro family and by all accounts it appears that turf managers will be more than pleased with addition.



Key Benefits
• Increased photosynthesis
• Increased nutrient uptake
• Increased root development
• Improved tolerance to abiotic stress
• Increased growth

[cascudi] 23/8/2018 15:27

Nice volume today

[wan] 23/8/2018 08:13

I believe we are approaching an interesting period from several aspects, impending launch and first sales for a corn seed treatment in the US (a very large market!) as well as, hopefully (given the updates thus far), a very positive trading update.

[wan] 20/8/2018 08:23

A promising strategy for crop disease management, which could supplement and/or replace chemical pesticides in the near future, is the application of biocontrol products that are capable of triggering innate plant defense responses, and momentum is building behind this strategy.

Recent PHC patent publications -

Published 18th July 2018

BENEFICIAL MICROBES FOR DELIVERY OF EFFECTOR PEPTIDES OR PROTEINS AND USE THEREOF

Disclosed are recombinant host cells comprising a promoter-effective nucleic acid molecule operably coupled to a nucleic acid molecule that encodes a plant effector protein or polypeptide that induces an active plant response including, among others, growth enhancement, disease resistance, pest or insect resistance, and stress resistance. Use of these recombinant host cells for modulating plant biochemical signaling, imparting disease resistance to plants, enhancing plant growth, imparting tolerance to biotic stress, imparting tolerance and resistance to abiotic stress, imparting desiccation resistance to cuttings removed from ornamental plants, imparting post-harvest disease or post-harvest desiccation resistance to a fruit or vegetable, or enhancing the longevity of fruit or vegetable ripeness are also disclosed.


Published 18th July 2018

HYPERSENSITIVE RESPONSE ELICITOR-DERIVED PEPTIDES AND USE THEREOF

Disclosed are hypersensitive-response eliciting peptides and non-hypersensitive response eliciting peptides that induce active plant responses, and that exhibit improved solubility, stability, resistance to chemical degradation, or a combination of these properties. Use of these peptides or fusion polypeptides, or DNA constructs encoding the same, for modulating plant biochemical signaling, imparting disease resistance to plants, enhancing plant growth, imparting tolerance to biotic stress, imparting tolerance and resistance to abiotic stress, imparting desiccation resistance to cuttings removed from ornamental plants, imparting post-harvest disease or post-harvest desiccation resistance to a fruit or vegetable, or enhancing the longevity of fruit or vegetable ripeness are also disclosed.

[trcml] 30/7/2018 12:34

Today's update isn't really news: much the same was in the recent trading statement 16 July 2018. I shouldn't have thought the share price would be affected. I would agree, however, that positive news is welcoming.

[wan] 30/7/2018 07:31

Today's update is welcome news, and the yield results, which are excellent, will surely pique further interest.

Regarding the prospects for Harpin in coffee, Brazil was ranked first among the leading coffee-producing countries worldwide in 2017. Coffee is of course grown elsewhere, so the potential market is very large.

It will also be very interesting see what other crops can benefit from the application of Harpin !

[wan] 27/7/2018 08:45

Aside from PHC's own findings, I have highlighted other scientific findings that provide strong evidence for the use of peptides in agriculture.

I found the following recent findings very interesting indeed, but the work is on-going to better understand the results. I am no scientist, but I wonder whether the ultimate effect was in part, or in full because of the peptides naturally produced by probiotics. Probiotics effect several actions, one being the production of different antimicrobial metabolites such as peptides (e.g. ribosomally synthesized antimicrobial peptides).

Fertilizer destroys plant microbiome’s ability to protect against disease
By Robert Sanders, Media relations | JULY 26, 2018

A new study of the role microbial communities play on the leaves of plants suggests that fertilizing crops may make them more susceptible to disease.

UC Berkeley biologists found that spraying tomatoes with microbes from healthy tomatoes protected them from disease-causing bacteria, but that fertilizing the tomatoes beforehand negated the protection, leading to an increase in the population of pathogenic microbes on the plants’ leaves.

While the researchers don’t yet know whether the increased number of bad bacteria on the leaves actually makes the tomatoes sick, the study clearly shows that fertilizer throws the community of microbes on the leaves off-balance. That potentially could allow disease-causing organisms to enter the plant.

“When we change the nutrient environment that plants are in, we are fundamentally altering the plant-microbiome interaction and also, importantly, the microbiome-mediated protection of natural plant/microbe interactions,” said senior author Britt Koskella, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of integrative biology.

The fertilizer effect was not the only surprise from the study, Koskella said. She and co-author Maureen Berg, a graduate student, were investigating how the density of the microbial community on the leaves affected the plants’ resistance to disease and discovered that a lower dose of beneficial microbes sprayed on the leaves was often more effective in protecting the plants from infection than higher doses. Berg sprayed leaves with an artificial microbial community composed of 12 species of bacteria taken from the natural microbiome of healthy tomatoes.

“We found that the most protective community was the most dilute, the least concentrated, the lowest dose,” she said. “This was completely nonintuitive. A medium dose gave medium protection and the highest dose was the least protective.”

Probiotics for plants
The reasons are unclear, but the findings are important because organic farmers are talking about spraying crops with probiotics to encourage better growth and disease protection, in the same way that humans consume probiotics containing “good” microbes in hopes of improving their health.

“The fact that we saw this lower-dose/higher-protection effect suggests it is not as simple as just throwing on more microbes,” Koskella said. “There is a lot of work to be done understanding how to apply a plant probiotic.”

She and Berg will report their findings in the Aug. 6 print edition of the journal Current Biology; the article will be posted online July 26.

Koskella focuses on plants’ above-ground microbiomes, or the phyllosphere, a poorly understood community compared to the well-studied below-ground microbiome associated with plant roots, the rhizosphere. Researchers are finding unsuspected activity within phyllosphere microbes, including that some of the bacteria fix nitrogen from the air like root-associated bacteria. Many studies have demonstrated that microbial communities in the roots can promote plants’ nutrient uptake, growth and resistance to disease, and Koskella is investigating whether this also holds true for the above-ground microbiome.

Her experiments are relevant to the issue of treating crops with probiotics, and could help answer questions such as: What is the right mix of bacteria for a given plant? What is the best way to apply this proper mix?

To investigate these questions, Koskella and Berg began by sampling the natural leaf microbes of healthy tomatoes grown in outdoor fields at UC Davis.

They then sprayed the mix on sterile tomato plants in growth chambers at UC Berkeley and, one week later, injected the leaves with Pseudomonas syringae bacteria, which cause tomato speck, a major problem that’s treated with pesticides. The new microbial community on the tomatoes did, in fact, protect the plants from colonization by pathogens, though the microbial communities obtained from some tomato fields worked better than the microbiomes from other fields.

“This phyllosphere microbial community, much like our own skin, is a first line of defense against disease, so we expected to see protection, though we didn’t know for sure,” Koskella said.

Artificial microbial communities
Surprisingly, when they varied the concentration of microbes sprayed on the leaves, they found that in many cases low dosages worked better than high dosages.

To find out why, they constructed an artificial microbial community composed of 12 of the species found on natural plants — basically, the 12 that grew best in culture. When they sprayed various dosages of the synthetic community on tomatoes, they got the same result: low, diluted doses were more protective against Pseudomonas than were high, concentrated doses.

Berg repeated the experiment to confirm the puzzling findings, but during one subsequent trial she decided to fertilize the droopy plants first. In that trial, none of the microbiome doses were protective against Pseudomonas. When they repeated the trial with and without fertilization, they confirmed that application of fertilizer abolished the protective effects previously observed.

In each experiment, they judged protection against pathogens by recording the relative population of Pseudomonas compared to the other, mostly beneficial microbes, since a healthy microbiome should effectively compete with a pathogen and knock it down to low levels.

Koskella has suspicions about why fertilizer alters the microbiome, top among them the possibility that the nutrients make healthier leaves, which keeps all the microbes happy and obviates the need for the good microbes to out-compete the bad microbes. She and her group are now pursuing experiments to test that hypothesis.

They still have no idea why probiotic treatment at low dosages works better than high doses, but hope that future research can solve this mystery and help guide the suitable application of probiotics in agriculture.

Nevertheless, Koskella and Berg said, the impact of fertilizer on the leaf and stem microbiome should lead biologists to explore fertilizer’s effect on the root microbiome as well, and on the general health of the plant.

“We have been fertilizing crops for so long it would surprise me if we haven’t already seen consequences of long-term fertilization on how plants interact with their microbes,” she said. “There are a lot of studies that show domesticated plants tend to have very different microbial communities than their wild relatives.”

The big questions are, does that affect the plant’s overall health, and why?

Koskella is one of the leaders of a new UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab joint initiative to put microbiome studies on a firmer scientific foundation, emphasizing reproducible experiments and testable theories and drawing upon the campus’s expertise in ecology, evolution, environmental science, the interactions between pathogens and their hosts, data science and cutting-edge genomics technology.

The newly published research was funded by UC Berkeley and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE 1106400) to Berg.

Source - hxxp://news.berkeley.edu/2018/07/26/fertilizer-destroys-plant-microbiomes-ability-to-protect-against-disease/



The other interesting element from the above scientific findings was the improved effect from a lower dosage, which I think PHC may have also noticed in recent trial results (my interpretation).

In any regard, the evidence supporting the use of biorationals in agriculture is adding momentum to the direction of travel!

[wan] 19/7/2018 07:56

Thanks Astonedt, that adds weight to my thoughts in post 37.

[wan] 17/7/2018 07:44

With PHC's commercial business now on a firm growth track (on track for a 30% increase over 2017) and with the PREtec technology platform still generating positive results and 'continued' interest, I think it's likely that some form of technology development agreement could be entered into. If this came to fruition, and depending on the percentage of the R&D the partner was responsible for, this could fast track PHC toward break-even/profitability (R&D in 2017 was $5.1 million).

The following comment from the Trading Statement is perhaps indicative -

"Outside Brazil, our partners continue to generate positive results with PREtec peptides. While the specific results remain confidential at this stage, partners are seeking to expand their evaluations and build closer relationships with Plant Health Care."

[wigwammer] 16/7/2018 09:03

Harpin alone likely covers the current market cap.

[riddlerone] 16/7/2018 08:46

The IP is where the value is maybe not right now but a few years down the line.They also have many years of data so any price above and beyond what RG paid for the placing /buyout shares looks a good place to start all IMHO of course.

[zipstuck] 16/7/2018 08:38

Without soyabean success what's it worth???

[riddlerone] 16/7/2018 08:23

I think there is some value here for one of the big six (soon to be 5 )and with RG in control with his large holding it wouldn't be a great shock to see them bought out.No real reason to invest here as that could be many months away and by their own conviction don't expect any licenses to be sold soon.

[wan] 16/7/2018 07:58

A mixed bag!

A disappointment in ASR, but I still believe the peptide approach will result in benefits to agriculture, indeed as indicated. Importantly, the yield results continue to generate interest from the large players, not to mention supportive scientific evidence.

Off-setting the disappointment is that significant growth in revenues will be realised, with further growth forecast going forwards.

[zipstuck] 16/7/2018 07:23

Jam tomorrow - increasing yields on sugar cane as sugar prices are falling??

[riddlerone] 16/7/2018 07:17

Well unfortunately yet again more delays so consider the can being kicked.

[wan] 12/7/2018 08:38

Recall that PHC's PREtec technology platforms ultimately regulate the genes in plants.

Readers will note the reference to gene regulation in the following article. The company ultimately being interviewed is a large player in the US;

Weeding Out the Noise in the Biostimulant Space

6th June 2018

"If we can use a product to upregulate or downregulate some genes, that’s something we’re starting to look at with a number of suppliers. We can track how we’re affecting a plant’s genetic expression. These are all in the R&D phase now. Things have certainly been ramped up in the last few years, which I think is good. That’s the natural evolution of things. We can see some yield and quality responses, but I don’t know if we can tell you why they did what they did. Now, we’re really starting to dive in to figuring out the ‘whys,’ especially with the next-generation products."

"We’re looking at newer products that trigger, or upregulate or downregulate a gene within a plant. So that’s kind of the frontier."

"I do see some real promising things on the frontier with companies using available technology to show activation of a gene within a plant, salt tolerance, and things like that. This is real and relevant within our space. I’m glad to see things moving in a more scientific direction."

Full article

[wan] 04/7/2018 07:51

There has been (and still is) a lot of interesting reports and activity on PHC's twitter feed. The teams appear to be 'very' ProAct®ive on different continents ;-)

[zipstuck] 26/6/2018 10:30

Funding again???