Projects •
Recommender system for biological control agents against plant pathogens
Full Title
Recommender system for biological control agents against plant pathogensDescription
Crop diseases caused by bacteria and fungi are a major threat to global food security, leading to significant agricultural losses. While chemical pesticides have traditionally been used to combat these diseases, their negative impact on the environment and human health has driven the need for more sustainable solutions.
Biological control agents (BCAs) offer a promising alternative. These beneficial microbes can inhibit plant pathogens without the harmful effects of chemical pesticides.
Developing new BCAs is a costly and time-consuming process for companies, and identifying effective commercial options can be challenging for farmers who often rely on recommendations from the companies selling these products.
The goal of PlantPathoRec is accelerating the discovery of new BCA by researchers (academia/biotech industry) by recommending new microbes with potential to inhibit plant pathogens, and recommending commercial BCA products to producers/farmers seeking to control disease in their fields.
The project will focus on the development of a new recommender systems startin by generating standardized datasets of microbe-pathogen interactions from the literature and the microbiome, and exploring the sequential and complex relation between those items, using sequence-aware and graph recommendation algorithms.