Hey readers,

Writing this edition from Brazil 😀!

I thought it would be all beaches and sea breeze, but it is actually a bit chilly.

This week we have a few Burkholderia species showing promise against two pathogenic crop fungi, though take it with a pinch of salt. A novel microcapsule out of Argentina built to carry living microbes safely to the field. And scientists have put together the most complete genetic map so far of Rhizoctonia solani AG-8, a first step toward getting ahead of the bare patch problem in Australia.

Let’s dive in!

Here is an interesting piece of work on bacteria from the Burkholderia family. Researchers at Ghent University in Belgium set out to control two fungi that cost growers around the world, using bacteria in place of chemical fungicides. Their study in Frontiers in Microbiology tested five bacteria from the Burkholderia group against grey mould (Botrytis cinerea), the fungus that rots tomato, and against Fusarium graminearum, which attacks wheat. Two of the five turned out to be species new to science, and the team named them Burkholderia mycopellens and Burkholderia crassaminum.

In the lab, all five held back the fungi, both by direct contact and by releasing antifungal substances into the air around them. On plants, they cut grey mould sharply on tomato leaves, and the treated plants stayed healthier than infected ones left alone. On wheat they lowered the amount of fungus, though the visible symptoms did not fully clear.

When the researchers read the bacteria's DNA, they found many clusters of genes for making antifungal compounds, with names like occidiofungin, ornibactin and pyochelin. Those compounds are most of the reason the bacteria work as well as they do.

Burkholderia is a mixed family, though. Some of its close relatives, in what is called the Burkholderia cepacia complex, can cause infections in people. On top of that, two of the strains proved toxic to the wheat. For both reasons the authors recommend not releasing the live bacteria in the field, but extracting and purifying the antifungal compounds instead.

The promise is a natural alternative to chemical fungicides, but the safer way to reach it may be to keep the compound and leave the bacteria out of the field.

Rhizoctonia solani AG-8 is a soil fungus that causes "bare patch," leaving stretches of a field with no plants standing. It attacks wheat, barley and legumes in Australia and costs growers more than 150 million Australian dollars a year, with no resistant crop varieties and fungicides that often fail. CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, has now put together the most complete genetic map of it so far (CSIRO, January 2026).

The first chromosome-level genome showed the fungus is dikaryotic: it carries two separate sets of genetic material, quite different from each other, as if one organism ran on two instruction manuals at once. Each set seems to take a different role in how it attacks wheat, which may be part of why it has been so hard to control.

This is groundwork, not a treatment, but it is the map needed to study the fungus across the country and manage it on purpose.

A biological input is a living microbe, and it can die easily. Heat, time in storage, or the wrong tank-mix partner can kill it before it reaches the field. BeCaps, an Argentine startup incubated in CREA Lab (the innovation arm of the CREA farming network), describes current losses as close to 80 percent of biologicals arriving in poor shape by the time they are applied, which is part of why only about one grower in twenty uses them (Noticias de Campo, January 2026).

The company's answer is a microcapsule, a shield around the microbe that holds it at room temperature for up to two years. It concentrates the product sharply, from about a liter per hectare down to ten grams, and can be mixed with conventional fertilizers.

The coating is mostly of natural origin, already used in food and pharmaceuticals, and the one synthetic part is classed as GRAS, generally recognized as safe.

Coated onto urea, the most used fertilizer in the world, the microbes lifted corn yield by close to 10 percent.

BeCaps does not sell a branded product. It licenses or reformulates the technology for biological and fertilizer companies and earns licensing fees, leaving distribution to them. After lab validation from 2021 to 2024, it raised 100,000 dollars in 2025 to scale, already holds orders for more than half a ton, and plans to start selling in 2026 and look abroad in 2027. The CEO and co-founder is Emiliano Barbero.

The bet is that what limits biologicals is not the microbe but the package around it, and that the fix belongs as much to the fertilizer companies as to the biological ones.