CDotBio is on a mission to protect crops using safer agtech

“We often compare ourselves to a smartphone application platform, like Apple Store or Google Play. Apps are essentially just computing code and algorithms – in plants, this code is represented in genes. Similar to how a smartphone platform offers new apps, our goal is a platform for unlocking new crop traits.

“These treatments can be reversible though – if we use RNA, we made sure that the trait expression stops when product application stops. In this case, the traits the nanodots help generate – whether it’s pest resistance or better crop yield – aren’t inherited, and the nucleotides and carbon nanoparticles degrade swiftly.”

What are the advantages of carbon nanodots compared to other solutions?

Teo Garcia-Millan: “Current solutions are constrained, and face issues like enzymatic or nuclease-driven biodegradation, photodegradation, chemical degradation, and soil stability. Specific approaches also have drawbacks: agrobacterium, for example, lack universal gene compatibility, and biolistics risk gene fragmentation during delivery. High costs of current delivery mechanisms necessitate new gene delivery methods for scaling their innovations.

“Carbon nanodots are much smaller than most other platforms being developed, which helps membrane penetration and cellular uptake. We can control the surface chemistry of these technologies to tweak their properties, enabling them to become more selective, but also ‘stickier’ if we want to retain the traits for a longer period or avoid degradation. Thus, we offer both delivery and protective capabilities.

“Other agrochemicals often linger in soil, posing contamination risks, or toxicity concerns. To avoid this, we harnessed nucleotides’ rapid degradation, a key challenge, to our advantage. When gene supply halts, the traits cease. The carbon nanodots can be made from many organic sources and manufactured at a low cost. We use only FDA-approved precursors – ensuring eco-friendliness and biocompatibility. Our starting materials can be found in the food section of your supermarket!”

Can you tell me how you decided to use carbon nanodots?

Teo Garcia-Millan: “It’s a concept taken from biomedical sciences. My PhD focused on the design of carbon nanodots for biomedical applications. I was a member of the Galan group at the School of Chemistry in the University of Bristol which was always open to collaboration. They already had a collaboration in place with Heather Whitney, a plant scientist who is now also part of the CDotBio team. Through customer discovery, we found a real potential niche for us in terms of commercial opportunities: there was a clear gap, or technical block, which was the lack of a reliable or resilient delivery system for nucleotide technologies and that was exactly what we could provide. So the technology originated from the biomedical field, applied through a collaboration with an academic in plant sciences, and refined through customer insights.

“These lab-proven technologies could have a massive impact for agricultural challenges. We truly believe that this will be the next generation of environmentally conscious agrochemicals.”