Solena Ag: Charting the Path to Sustainable and Responsible Agriculture.

“We are opening the door to farming in the future where farmers have actual control on the fertility of their soil, managing to produce intensively and sustainably”.

In September 2020 Solena was selected to be a part of Illumina Accelerator in San Francisco, USA, and is currently concluding such a titanic endeavor. When the results had just been announced the expectation was to implement, thanks to the resources provided by Illumina, further development and innovation in the company’s processes to address and analyze the state of farming soils with better biotechnological tools. Thus, providing solutions better adapted to the needs of each farmer and crop, and more affordable at a global scale.

?Today, in the last stage of the initial phase, the projected results exceeded all expectations. In an interview, Adriana Ceniceros, Lead Agri-Genomics Scientist at Solena, doctor in Vegetable Biotechnology, who designed, and is currently coordinating Solena’s project in Illumina Accelerator, sets the results in context. “It is an unprecedented project, there is no one in the world who has done anything similar to what we are doing” she says, “60 TB of information has been successfully sequenced, this is equivalent to 18K the human genome, with over 7K samples” She stated that it’s the largest project seen at Illumina Accelerator since it was founded in 2014.

?Dr. Obed Ramírez, Soil Data Scientist at Solena agrees, “Information is being obtained from thousands of genomes and hundreds of metagenomes and metatranscriptomes in an unprecedented amount for an agro Company in Mexico and the world. It is a unique opportunity to study the communities and functions of microorganisms from the soil of over 20 crops of great economic importance.”

?Furthermore, they both agree that the advances achieved during this time are a true agricultural revolution. Dr. Ceniceros compares it, at a global scale, to the age of the Green Revolution; the most food produced worldwide in the decades from the 60s to the 80s. This growth generated revenue of up to three times the basic production. However, the growth spun out of control causing devastating effects on the environment, human health, and soil erosion issues. In consequence, over 90% of the soil is projected to be eroded by 2050.

?As explained by Dr. Obed, the improvements currently carried out by Solena signify a true agricultural revolution at a global scale. Using microorganisms to improve nutrient intake, counteract plagues and diseases, and promote plant development will diminish dependence on fertilizers, pesticides, and other synthetic compounds that can have negative effects on the environment. In addition, the use of microorganisms promotes an improvement on soil health as well and, as a consequence, will contribute to develop a type of sustainable agriculture that can face the challenges of the upcoming years, such as higher demand due to population growth, erosion, and climate change. They are likewise oriented to the use of microorganisms to conduct biological fertilization combined with an intelligent use of agrochemicals.

?In the future, Solena aims to develop a new revolution that marks the history of humankind due to high returns, but sustainably. The objective is to find efficient soil-health markers in order to identify how the microorganisms found in the soil interact with it to solve problems determined by the analysis.

?With this project, Solena will be able to mine thousands of genomes and hundreds of metagenomes to know both the primary and secondary metabolism, of microorganisms and focus on the functions relevant to agriculture; nutrient solubilization, antifungal production, insecticides, siderophores, growth promoters, etc. Giving rise to the bases to develop inoculants and other products from genomic information for Solena Ag to be positioned as an unprecedented company, due to its methodology, in the agro-biotech area, are set.

?Finally, Dr. Ceniceros explains that current microbial inoculants do not have a guaranteed efficacy, hence the farmers are reluctant to replace agrochemicals due to voluble options. As Irving Rivera, CEO of Solena states “We are opening the door to farming in the future where farmers have actual control on the fertility of their soil, managing to produce intensively and sustainably”.?

?The two biggest challenges in the future, according to the doctor, are diagnosing soil health and providing reliable and guaranteed solutions. But if anything is certain, both for Solena and Illumina Accelerator, it is that the first steps on the right path to sustainable and responsible agriculture now have a name: Solena Ag.