Science and Technology Daily (Reporter Wang Zhuhua and Correspondent Li Tianchang)
Trichoderma is one of the most widely used biocides in agricultural production, accounting for more than 60% of the world's registered biocides. However, the raw materials, costs and methods of production have limited its large-scale promotion and application.
Professor Liu Tong's team from School of Plant Protection, Hainan University, has addressed the aforesaid problems by using trichoderma spore powder produced from tropical agricultural wastes to achieve optimization from the laboratory to large-scale production and application. This research has brought important progress in solid fermentation application of trichoderma.
Prof. Liu Tong's team selected cassava peel as fermentation substrate from five kinds of tropical agricultural wastes: coconut shell, banana pseudostem, cassava peel, sugarcane bagasse, and pineapple peel, and optimized the fermentation conditions through one-way and response surface design, allowing trichoderma to complete the fermentation under the laboratory conditions in only three days, and the concentration of spores reached 9.31×109 spores/gram.
In order to expand the scale of fermentation, the team also researched and designed a bioreactor with ventilation and stirring system, implemented a low-cost, large-scale and highly automated way of factory production of trichoderma spore powder. For the first time they transformed cassava peel into trichoderma biopesticides, providing a new solution idea for the recycling of tropical agricultural resources.
The research result, entitled "Rapid mass production of cassava peel biopesticide trichoderma using a newly established solid fermentation bioreactor system", was recently published in the Journal of Environmental Management, an internationally renowned environmental journal. Postgraduate Zhang Cheng and postdoctoral fellow Raja Asad Ali Khan are the first and co-first authors of the paper, and Prof. Liu Tong is the corresponding author of the paper.
In recent years, Prof. Liu Tong's team has achieved a series of important results around the creation and application of new microbial agents, which has published 15 academic papers in authoritative journals at home and abroad, constructed more than 6,000 strains of bio-antimicrobial resource library, discovered 7 efficient bio-antimicrobial strains (national patent strains), declared 23 national invention patents, of which 5 patents have been transformed by the enterprise. The transformation of scientific and technological achievements reached 5,630,000 RMB. They have also innovated 3 sets of green and efficient production process and equipment, as well as developed 15 new biological products.
(Photo provided by interviewee)
