Woodland-based soil-science company Pheronym Inc. has been granted its second patent for an agricultural biocontrol product that influences the behavior of nematodes.
The new patent is for a pheromone product that dissuades plant-parasitic nematodes, or flatworms, from attacking plants.
“These are bad nematodes. They are really bad guys. They eat roots,” said CEO Fatma Kaplan.
Pheromones influence animal or insect behavior. Pheronym’s new patent is for its product Pherocoat, which changes the behavior of plant-parasitic nematodes and turns them away from attacking plant roots, said Karl Cameron Schiller, chief operating officer of Pheronym.
Pheronym was granted its first patent in 2020 for its product Nemastim, which is a pheromone that causes beneficial nematodes to more effectively and aggressively act as biocontrols to attack soil insect pests that decrease crop yield.
Pheronym's products control the behavior of microscopic flatworms in soil to keep them from infecting plants or to make them attack pests.
The company, which is not yet generating revenue, is working to raise funding to run scientific field trials and to get regulatory approvals for its products, Kaplan said.
It is also creating differentiated products because its seed-company clients want different applications based on crop types. For example, commodity crop growers of corn and cotton tend to want applications applied directly to the seed, whereas specialty crop producers, like growers of tomatoes and peppers, tend to want products that are applied through irrigation.
The seed companies also want information about dosage requirements for effectiveness, Kaplan said.
Launched in Davis in 2017, the company gained attention in 2019 for its “Nematodes in Space” project with NASA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study the effects of zero gravity on nematodes aboard the International Space Station.
Pheronym last year was awarded a $1 million Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation.
Pheronym has developed methods to brew up pheromones that can control the actions of nematodes, whose thousands of species are the most abundant critters on earth. Pest nematodes, especially root-knot nematodes, can attack some 2,000 plant species worldwide, and they account for 5% of global crop losses.
Most controls for flatworms currently are synthetic chemical nematicides that are being phased out due to their environmental toxicity.
The company is based at the shared lab space in the Lab@AgStart in Woodland. The company is in the region because Kaplan moved the startup from the IndieBio accelerator program in San Francisco to Davis in 2017. When Pheronym graduated from IndieBio, it needed an affordable and fully provisioned wet-lab space, which it found at the UC Davis-HM.Clause Life Science Innovation Center south of Davis. The company moved into that lab in 2018 and graduated out a few years later to the Lab@AgStart.
