Corteva Agriscience, Wilmington, Del., and MicroMGx, Chicago, announced a collaboration to provide farmers a wider range of microbial-based crop protection products.

Under the agreement, MicroMGx will apply its metabologenomics platform to accelerate the identification of new natural product starting points. In what is said to be a first for the agriculture industry, Corteva will use those starting points to discover and develop naturally derived crop protection solutions.

Corteva uses spinosyns, active ingredients produced by naturally fermenting soil bacteria, to protect crops from insect damage.

“With 20-plus years of leadership in green chemistry, Corteva Agriscience has a long and successful track record of discovering natural and naturally derived products,” says Neal Gutterson, senior vice president and CTO, Corteva Agriscience. “We are excited to collaborate with MicroMGx to explore novel approaches for speeding up the process of discovering the next generation of innovative crop protection solutions.”

“We believe in our platform’s potential to uncover impactful new crop protection products. We’re enthusiastic to be partnering with Corteva Agriscience because of their strong portfolio of natural and naturally derived products,” says Anthony Goering, chief scientific officer of MicroMGx.

MicroMGx’s metabologenomics platform was developed through a collaboration between research groups at Northwestern University’s Chemistry of Life Processes Institute, Evanston, Ill., and the University of Illinois’ Institute for Genomic Biology, Champaign, Ill.