Hey readers!

A lot going on in the industry this week!

We can see the market opening the door to new molecules and compounds. Today, we look at new releases built around metabolites and RNA molecules:

Cofepris has granted the world's first sanitary registration for a biofungicide built on RNA. The product is Oifirax, for powdery mildew in grape. The review took nine months and ran through three agencies: Cofepris, Senasica and Semarnat.

The active ingredient is neither a microorganism nor a metabolite. Oifirax works through double-stranded RNA that temporarily blocks a gene the fungus needs in order to survive, and it does not alter the crop's own DNA, so no genetically modified organism is involved.

GreenLight Biosciences, the company that developed it, spent more than ten years on it, with field trials run in Mexico and twenty other countries. According to Cofepris, it leaves no residues and acts on that fungus alone.

The approval comes with a factory. GreenLight will build a manufacturing plant in Mexico City on an initial investment of close to US$100 million, and projects 500 direct specialised jobs and a similar number of indirect ones.

There are still aspects to watch. Genetic similarity between the target sequence and genes in non-target organisms needs continued evaluation, and a product that always acts on the same gene leaves room for individuals carrying a variant of it to become less sensitive.

Víctor Hugo Borja Aburto, the head of Cofepris, said at the announcement that 197 pesticide registrations have been revoked, which opens room for other technologies such as this one in the Mexican market.

Bioma, part of the Cogny group, has registered Metabolic Protection with Brazil's Ministry of Agriculture and launched it at the 15th Andav Congress in São Paulo. There is no microorganism in the formulation. It is a blend of around 40 microbial metabolites, more than 20 with direct antifungal activity and 17 that switch on the plant's own defences.

The label covers anthracnose (Colletotrichum truncatum) and target spot (Corynespora cassiicola) in soybean. Development took five years with Orygen, the group's research company, and the product was evaluated across more than 50 Brazilian producing regions.

Without a living cell to keep alive, viability in storage and colonisation in the field stop being the limiting factors. This metabolite-based technology could take a real share of biological disease control, as long as the product keeps holding up in the field.

Jord BioScience won Biological Crop Input Solution of the Year in the 2026 AgTech Breakthrough Awards for 9311, a recently launched seed-applied biostimulant now registered in more than 25 states.

The product is built on what the company calls microbial activator technology, which improves microbial performance by activating the soil biology already present in the field. Jord's position is that microbes do not function in isolation, and that biological innovation should not either.

9311 uses an elite microbial isolate identified through the company's proprietary discovery and development platform, which screens a library of more than 6,500 isolates on how each performs alone and on how it interacts with plants, soil biology, nutrients and chemistry.

In soybeans, 9311 delivered an average yield advantage of 2.6 bushels per acre compared with leading seed treatments and biological products. Across three years of testing in environments with low, medium and high yields, it generated a positive return in 79 percent of trials, using Jord's threshold of above half a bushel per acre.

Soybean trials also showed more than a 30 percent increase in biomass, along with improved stand count and earlier emergence, which the company translates to an estimated 20 to 30 dollars per acre return for farmers.

Aucklandia lappa is a perennial medicinal plant whose dried roots have been used for more than 2,000 years, with national sales in China above 8,300 tonnes in 2024. In recent years Meloidogyne hapla has become a serious problem in the crop.

From healthy roots of that same plant, researchers at Yunnan Agricultural University isolated an endophyte: Serratia liquefaciens ML4, deposited as CGMCC 30599. Its fermentation broth, diluted 1:2, killed 95.82% of second-stage juveniles within 24 hours. Undiluted, it blocked 99.51% of eggs from hatching over 72 hours.

What acts on the nematode is a volatile. The team found six compounds coming off the bacteria: 1-octen-3-one, 6-methyl-5-hepten-2-one, dimethyl disulfide, dimethyl trisulfide, 2-phenylethanol and 2-isobutyl-3-methylpyrazine. The most potent of the six is 1-octen-3-one, with a fumigation LC50 of 5.45 × 10⁻³ µL/L, which is a very small amount of gas to kill half the nematodes in the chamber.

The step from dish to soil brought the numbers down. In pots, against plants given only water, a single application cut disease by 57.14% and stem diameter rose by as much as 30.84%. Also in pots, the broth gave more underground fresh weight than fosthiazate, the chemical nematicide: 15.05 g against 8.43 g. In a field microplot, two applications cut disease by 62.79%.

What the authors conclude is that the volatiles in the fermentation broth are the active ingredient in this case, which is what makes ML4 worth developing further as an alternative against root-knot nematodes.