Italian firm Endura Fine Chemicals is to commercialise a technology to encapsulate insecticide into tiny crystals. The originators believe that this has almost unlimited potential, because it will by-pass insects’ ability to develop resistance and ultimately enable farmers to destroy pests that can decimate many crops.

The technology developed out of research over the course of some ten years by Dr Graham Moores of the UK-based Rothamsted Research, an agricultural research institute of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the UK funding agency for research in the life sciences, and Dr Robin Gunning of the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries (NSWDPI) in Australia.

The encapsulation works by delaying the release of insecticides, thus enabling an enzyme enhibitor, or synergist, to disable the enzymes which insects use to block tpesticides. Most potential synergists are too toxic for use in agriculture, so Moores and Gunning identified piperonyl butoxide (PBO), a naturally occurring synergist of which Endura is by far the world’s main supplier, as a likely candidate.

However, PBO typically takes five hours to cross the cuticle into the insects and inhibit the enzyme, which meant that insects’ enzymes could block the insecticide before the PBO could act. Spraying crops twice at five hour intervals with PBO and an insecticide being impractical, Moores and Gunning developed a microencapsulation system with a five-hour time delay.

According to Dr Cosimo Franco, managing director of Endura Fine Chemicals, this could open up agriculture to much wider use of PBO. “The use of PBO contributes to solving the problem of resistance in crops, but it also allows the use of smaller quantities of pesticides, thus reducing the environmental impact. Endura’s next step if to promote the concept of microencapsulated PBO in agriculture throughout the world in collaboration with strategic partners,” he added.

“The beauty of the concept is that it should act on any insect pest,” claimed Moores. “In terms of value, one could almost take the cost of insecticide- resistance as a whole to be the possible saving by this technology. Clearly this would be unrealistic, but the point is, it is difficult to assess a possible monetary or crop saving, as it is potentially so vast.”