WEBINAR RECORDING: Nature’s Toolkit for Agriculture — Lunch and Lessons from 2026 AGRO Awardees

Webinar RECORDING

Originally aired: 23 September 2026

Presenter: Dr. Michael Appell, 2026 Kenneth A. Spencer Award winner.  Collaborator, US Department of Agriculture (Retired)

Moderator: Solito Sumulong, Principal, Concerted Innovations LLC

Description:

This was the second installment of our mini-series spotlighting the 2026 AGRO Division award winners. Our thanks to Dr. Giorgio Rizzo and Dr. Taicia Fill for two outstanding talks, and to our series sponsor, JRF Global, for making the Lunch and Learn webinars possible. If you could only watch one webinar this year, make it this one: it follows a single agricultural problem from the soil to the storage room, and the Q&A at the end is worth staying for.

Recap:

Dr. Giorgio Rizzo showed that a seed-coating biopolymer made from crustacean-shell waste, for under $10 per kilogram, has roughly doubled chickpea yields in Moroccan field trials, with promising early results in tomato, barley, and castor bean. Dr. Taicia Fill explained how her lab used imaging mass spectrometry to catch the fungus behind citrus blue mold in the act. They traced its ability to cause disease to a single gene that produces a cyclic peptide toxin, and showed that deleting that gene sharply reduces the fungus’s ability to infect fruit. When an attendee asked whether cold storage, where blue mold thrives, changes how much toxin the fungus makes, Dr. Fill noted the peptides stay stable in the cold, though whether cold changes the gene’s activity is a question her lab hopes to test next. Together, the two talks made the case that studying, and sometimes borrowing, nature’s own chemistry may be agriculture’s best path to safer, more targeted crop protection.

What you will learn:

Together, these talks connect molecular plant pathology to applied agricultural materials science:

• The role of cyclic peptides and the HcpA enzyme in Penicillium italicum virulence and citrus postharvest disease.
• Why the ΔhcpA mutant (the strain with that gene deleted) grows normally but causes much smaller lesions, and what that suggests about time-regulated virulence.
• How chitosan, a material derived from crustacean shells, is processed into biopolymer fertilizers and delivery systems for beneficial soil bacteria.
• How these biomaterials compare with conventional agricultural inputs in field experiments, including crop yield results.

Presenter Bios:

• Dr. Giorgio Rizzo, Postdoctoral Associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology — 2026 AGRO International Award Winner for Research in Agrochemicals. Dr. Rizzo earned his doctorate in Chemistry at the University of Bari, where he studied chemical-physical modification of biopolymers for high-tech applications. He now works in Prof. Benedetto Marelli’s group at MIT, developing agricultural solutions for plantations affected by climate change, desertification, and high soil salinity, using next-generation fertilizers and technologies based on natural biomaterials.
• Dr. Taicia Pacheco Fill, Associate Professor, Institute of Chemistry, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil — 2026 Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry Research Article of the Year. Dr. Fill leads the Microbial Chemical Biology Laboratory (LaBioQuiMi). Her research covers natural products chemistry, chemical ecology, pathogen–host interactions, and the biosynthesis of fungal secondary metabolites. She received the 2019 L’Oréal–UNESCO–Brazilian Academy of Sciences For Women in Science Award and is an Affiliated Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

This webinar series is part of the AGRO Division’s ongoing commitment to providing technical excellence and regulatory insight to the agrochemical community. For past webinar recordings, please visit the Lunch and Learn Webinar Archive.

A special thank you to our tech host, Kyle Sawyer, and our 2026 sponsor, JRF Global.

We hope to see you at our next webinar!