The US Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health awarded the funding under its STREAM program as researchers plan to design and test alternatives to existing herbicides.
An MIT-led research team has been awarded funding of up to $53 million by the US Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health to develop alternatives to current weed killers, the university said.
The project follows years of herbicide use in which some weeds have developed genetic mutations that make the chemicals less effective, threatening crop yields, MIT said. Christopher Voigt, head of MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering, is the principal investigator for the project, called Precision Learning for On-target Weed control, or PLOW.
The team plans to develop generative superintelligence (SI) models to propose chemical compounds and small interfering RNA, or siRNA, that target plant enzymes affected by existing herbicides. SI is intended to help researchers search for candidates designed to be inexpensive to make and to carry lower risks of resistance, harm to people and ecological damage.
Chemical herbicides can act directly on an enzyme: glyphosate, for example, interferes with one plants need to make important amino acids. Small interfering RNA instead works through RNA interference, a process that can suppress the activity of a target gene and reduce production of its corresponding protein.
MIT’s Connor Coley and Regina Barzilay and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Alexander Tropsha lead the model-development group. A screening team led by MIT’s Angela Koehler and the Broad Institute’s Jaime Cheah will test candidates for whether they hit their targets and feed the results back into the models.
Researchers from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Robigo are expected to help lead greenhouse studies of shortlisted molecules under different agricultural conditions.
The annual carbon budget projects a 0.4% decline in fossil-fuel and cement carbon dioxide emissions in 2026, but rising land-use emissions are expected to push total emissions to a record 43.3 billion tonnes.
MIT said farm workers can be exposed through frequent herbicide use, while other US residents can encounter small amounts in food and drinking water. The team also plans to develop living microbial systems to break down agricultural chemicals before they reach food, soil or waterways, with the aim of reducing human and environmental exposure.
MIT says exposure to herbicides, whether through frequent use at work or through small amounts in food and drinking water, may contribute to increased risks of cancer, metabolic and endocrine disorders, and other adverse health outcomes.
MIT said alternatives could also reduce US dependence on imported phosphorus used in glyphosate. Voigt warned that resistance combined with disruptions to supplies of herbicide ingredients could threaten access to chemicals he considers essential to high crop yields and affordable prices.
MIT expects the first greenhouse tests of initial RNA interference candidates to be complete by the end of the program’s first year. The studies are intended to assess performance under agricultural conditions, a step toward identifying candidates for further development.
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