If having the ability to get a 7-10-day early warning on plant disease in your no-till corn crop interests you, that possibility may be in your crop protection arsenal quicker than you think.

Central Indiana startup Insignum AgTech has proven it can use corn’s own DNA to provide growers with 1 week or more advance notice of the presence of gray leaf spot infection over scouting with the naked eye. The company’s technology causes leaf infestations to “grow” large purple areas surrounding each disease breach on the leaf’s surface, leading to easy visual detection by eye or camera.

Linking Genes

Insignum CEO Kyle Mohler says the new technology is the result of the Boone County, Ind., company’s on-going collaboration with Purdue University. The technology relies solely on DNA found in all corn plants.

“Everyone is familiar with so-called Indian corn, which features many the bright colored kernels so popular in autumn decorations and on seed company catalog pages,” Mohler says. “The DNA for each of those pretty colors is present in all corn, from sweet corn varieties to the No. 2 Yellow field corn that dominates fields across the Midwest each summer.”

Mohler says the company isolated the genes that switch on the purple color and linked them with the corn genes that allow a plant to mount a defense against disease infection as soon as a fungal spore lands on the leaf surface.

“Just like our own bodies that respond to invading pathogens with an immune response, the corn plant signals various responses to the invasion of its leaves and stalk by plant pathogens or other pests,” he says.

By linking the two genetic responses, Insignum has demonstrated the ability to trigger the purple circle around leaf damage site caused by plant disease. Without the linked responses, the disease would be recognized only by a tiny, difficult to see black dot.

“We have solid in-field data that correlates the visual response on corn to gray leaf spot, and our research shows the technology responds to every single fungal plant disease that has infected corn so far,” Mohler says. “On average, it turns color in about 1 week before we would be able to see symptoms of disease otherwise.” 

Throughout the 2024 season, the Insignum detection system was being tested against tar spot in numerous greenhouse and laboratory studies at Purdue to verify the technology can play a part in cutting the losses the devastating disease has caused to North American corn over the past several seasons. Insignum also continues testing and collaboration with Beck’s Hybrids field-testing program.

Positive ROI Possible

“On average across the country, the network of extension agents suggests we lose sometimes more than $4-5-billion of corn to diseases each year,” Mohler says. “That averages to something like $40 to $50 or a bit more per acre that we hope to mitigate economically by allowing growers treat earlier, and only on acres needing the treatment.”

Mohler says he remembers fungicide treatments on his family’s farm and those of his neighbors were usually done across the total acreage of fields as “insurance” against disease.

“In many cases, I now realize not all those acres needed a fungicide treatment, and that pushed up our input costs significantly,” he says. “I took that memory to college with me, and after training in biochemistry and molecular biology, I wanted to address the ill-timed, and many times, over-application of fungicides. I knew plants had these reaction systems and set out to find ways to leverage them into allowing the plant to tell us when it needed help at the earliest possible time.”

That was the foundation of Insignum, and Mohler says it’s the company’s core business is now. Insignum seems to be confident its technology will soon be valuable in the tar spot fight, although an exact release time is yet unannounced.

“We’re trying to license our technology to seed companies that want to include us in their hybrid bags, and they will have to run our traits through their testing, so it will be a few more years before growers will be able to buy our responses in seed,” Mohler says. “Meanwhile, growers excited about testing our traits can contact us at InsignumAgTech.com.”

Color-Coded Future?

Mohler says he would like to develop similar technology for soybeans and other row crops like canola, and those projects are in the development pipeline. Even more interesting, however, is a portfolio of similar technology harnessing color responses to various plant stressors.

“We have the ability to respond to whatever’s going on at any given time and can envision products that could provide a system of color-coded early warning for, say, insect damage or drought,” Mohler says.

The technology would play well with modern variable rate technology, according to Mohler, but he prefers to see Insignum’s contribution as more of a “decision ag solution,” rather than a precision ag solution.

“We don’t want to provide an additional data point for farmers already struggling to assimilate all the data on their monitors,” he says. “Rather, we want to give growers critical information about what they need to do today to optimize their production.”