Rojas Moves Toward Commercialization of Biological Control Agents

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Rice lesions caused by pathogen (A). No lesions are present when pathogen is mixed with biological control strain (B).

By Belinda Watson, Research Intern

Clemencia Rojas describes many stages of her career as serendipitous. While nearly every step is marked with significant success, her progress can in no way be attributed to chance. Instead, her hard work, flexibility and hunger for a challenge pushed her to work on what would become award-receiving research.

Rojas is an assistant professor in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at the University of Arkansas, and her expertise lies in understanding bacterial diseases in plants. Rojas studies the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the genes within the plant that help the plant to fight pathogens, work for which she has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. She has also studied a wide variety of pathogens including Pseudomonas syringae, Burkholderia glumae and Burkholderia gladioli, the latter two bacteria causing bacterial panicle blight in rice.

It was her work with Burkholderia glumae and Burkholderia gladioli and their interactions with rice that gave way to commercialization. According to the Arkansas Farm Bureau, the 1.286 million acres of rice produced in the state in 2015 amounted to 49% of the total rice production in the United States. As Arkansas continues to be the top rice producer, any pathogen that infects such crops would then have an incredible impact on all stages of production and consumption. This is where Rojas' work comes in. Her "bread and butter," as she calls it, is research into bacterial diseases in plants at the molecular and cellular level as well as studying how real diseases impact crop yield. However, a graduate student's interest in the applied and ecological aspects of plant diseases spurred the inception of their latest technology.

Using a bacterial collection passed on from a previous professor, who had at that point retired, this student began what started as a random project. Her objective was to use the collection to identify a strain of bacteria that could inhibit the growth of the pathogen impacting rice yields. Instead of one, the student found a couple of strains with growth inhibitory activity against the pathogen, which could be used as biological control agents. As they began compiling their research into a publication, Rojas was struck by the potential market applications of these two bacteria.

Current biological control agents consist of living organisms sprayed on a crop to reduce the impact of disease on a plant population. However, these methods are viewed as not very effective, because the biological control agents are living organisms that need specific conditions in the environment to survive. She and her team discovered that they could reproduce that same disease-fighting effect via the secretions from the biological control agents, liquid products derived from the biological control agent but free of the organism that produce them. This liquid product eliminates questions regarding effectiveness and reliability controlling the pathogen.

At this point, Rojas applied for the University of Arkansas Chancellor's Commercialization Fund, receiving an award in 2019 and another in 2020. This funding allowed her and her students to continue exploring how to apply the liquid products of the controlling bacteria as well as delve further into the bacterial panicle blight they confront.

Once again, Rojas diverged from the traditional research path, going out of her comfort zone and into the world of commercialization. The National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps or "I-Corps" program facilitates the commercialization of research by providing a safety net of resources and funding for researchers looking to take their work to the market. A new student in her lab was at the early stages of his career, so, through this program designed to facilitate this initial interaction between market and researcher, he began contributing to the team's work by interviewing potential customers. Through this funding, and access to industry needs, the team continued to research the bacterial panicle blight in rice.

Rojas has moved forward to participate in the NSF's $50,000 National I-Corps Spring Cohort No. 4 and has been working with an industry mentor from Bayer Crop Sciences.  After the NSF National I-Corps program, if customer discovery results prove to be favorable, Rojas will apply for the Chancellor's $100,000 GAP Fund, continue on to start a new company and work to raise their initial round of seed capital through the SBIR/STTR program.

The purpose of this technology, for Rojas, is to solve a problem. "I didn't pursue my career path because it was fashionable, or because it was easy. I pursued it because it was hard," she says. "I view pursuing hard things as my personal challenge, and I feel an immense sense of pride when I succeed, so I do not shy away from those challenges."

Rojas approaches every day in the lab as an opportunity to learn, hoping that her work will one day give way to applications to other plant diseases and even the potential for combating human disease with active antibiotics stemming from a similar bacterial origin. Rojas ambitiously looks forward to the future of her research, in both the lab and in the industry.