PITTSBURGH — A team of graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh set out to address the shortcomings of nitrogen fertilizer. While it’s vital for crop growth and global food production, nitrogen fertilizer is also a leading cause of environmental pollution and a huge input cost for farmers.
Enter AgriNue, an agricultural innovation inspired by the technology behind the COVID-19 vaccine.
The product, created by Pitt Swanson School of Engineering graduate researchers Patrick Dunn and Alireza Mohammadzadeh, works by encapsulating nutrients in soil-penetrating, plant-based lipid particles and delivering plant food directly to root zones, making it highly efficient, waste-free and more environmentally friendly.
Dunn and Mohammadzadeh were finalists in the 2024 National Inventors Hall of Fame Collegiate Inventors Competition for helping to develop AgriNue. The top prize went to a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Oct. 18 for its invention which has the potential to transform food fortification by enhancing nutrients in food to help 2 billion people globally who suffer from micronutrient deficiencies.
Despite not winning, Dunn said that recognition of their idea’s originality, potential value and usefulness to society was its own reward for their years of research and hard work.
Steven Little, one of the team’s advisors at Pitt and a chemical engineer, told Farm and Dairy that it was exciting to see how cross-disciplinary and institutional collaborations can lead to bold, new ideas ready to be taken to the next level.
“I think that’s really one of the most interesting parts of the story,” Little said. “You know, whenever you start to take the advances that people have made,” such as applying biomedical technology to agriculture, even with restrictive design constraints. “Now you can start to say, ‘well, how can we take some of these advances we’ve made in biology and in medicine and apply them to the environment?’ I think that’s a really cool thing.”
Introducing AgriNue
AgriNue could be a game-changer for agriculture.
“Conventional synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, as we know, is extremely inefficient and has caused these really severe environmental problems across the country and the world,” Dunn said. “And it’s also been causing a lot of huge economic impacts as well just from the waste. It’s a cost to farmers, and then also the environmental impacts come with an economic price as well.”
Though the market currently offers slow or controlled-release fertilizers, which deposit a small, steady amount of nutrients in the soil over time, Dunn said such products have limitations, from using non-biodegradable components and toxic solvents in their manufacturing methods, to not being as scalable as they could be for widespread use.
AgriNue, Dunn said, can address all these things. It’s made from biodegradable components — the lipid composition packaging the fertilizer is derived from soybeans and sunflowers. It’s cheap to produce in large amounts. And it’s really smart.
The breakthrough in AgriNue’s lipid-based nanoparticles design came from an unexpected source: The COVID-19 vaccine.
According to the Mayo Clinic, mRNA vaccines, such as the one used to treat COVID-19, deliver encoded instructions to muscle cells so they begin manufacturing a specific protein located on the virus’s surface, which tells the body to generate antibodies that will fight infection.
But normally, mRNA degrades quickly on its own. Capitalizing on decades of research while racing against time in the midst of the pandemic, scientists used lipid nanoparticles, tiny protective bubbles of fat, to encapsulate and protect that vital mRNA so it could do its job, marking a milestone in the nanoparticle field, as Chemical & Engineering News reported after regulatory approval of the initial vaccines.
Following the vaccine’s immense success, the scientific community questioned what else lipid nanoparticles could do.
“So we thought, ‘OK, what if we use a similar packaging?’” said Mohammadzadeh, a bioengineering Ph.D. candidate.
The idea behind AgriNue is to use lipid nanoparticles to encapsulate fertilizer, which is engineered to be sensitive to the presence of plant roots. When the particles come into proximity with roots, they release their “cargo” — the fertilizer — in a controlled manner, ensuring that the nutrients are delivered where they are needed most and nowhere else.
Power of ideas
In addition to its scalability, the technology is mightily adaptable.
“Different plants need different amounts of fertilizer. And some of them probably need different types of fertilizer. Like, some of them require more nitrogen. Some of them require more phosphorus,” Mohammadzadeh said.
The team behind AgriNue can change the composition of the nanoparticles to encapsulate specific nutrients, making the solution tailor-made for different crops and farming practices.
According to Dunn, AgriNue has shown encouraging results when tested in different soil types, suggesting it would fare well just about anywhere.
“We feel confident that it could be applicable to different geographical regions, not just only, you know, soils from Pennsylvania or, you know, the Corn Belt or something like that.”
Costs
Keeping costs down is another area of focus for the team. They’re working on lipid compositions that are inexpensive so they can introduce the product into an already crowded market and compete against alternatives such as animal manure. Mohammadzadeh said it was the team’s goal to make sure the benefits of using AgriNue outweigh its sticker price.
AgriNue’s safety and effectiveness, Dunn said, is not in question. The team is confident in its potential applications and encouraged by its performance in tests thus far — a number of larger-scale studies are planned for the next six months to prove its effectiveness.
Dunn said he understood that to some, the emergence of nanotechnology in the same fields and plant beds they’ve always worked in may spark questions about its efficacy.
“I think one of the challenges may be, just from a public standpoint, things that are on the nano or macro scale (can) cause concern, and (with) any change in technologies in agriculture, usually there’s a little bit of pushback, because there’s been decades worth of knowledge using conventional fertilizers or the technologies that are currently available to farmers,” he said.
But there’s no risk from AgriNue of harmful reactions in the plants it helps to grow or the soil they’ll grow in, since the lipid composition is coming from plants.
“As a result, it’s not causing any hypersensitive reaction. It’s not causing any harmful reaction,” Mohammadzadeh said.
Team effort
Both Dunn and Mohammadzadeh emphasized that the work it took to develop AgriNue has been a team effort, with numerous important contributions from their peers and colleagues who are experts in various fields, including Leanne Gilbertson, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University, and Emily Elliot, a Pitt professor in the Department of Geology & Environmental Science.
Mohammadzadeh was ecstatic when their initial tests showed AgriNue was working. But it was the faith of the competition’s judges, former inductees to the Hall of Fame of Inventors themselves, and their belief the team’s work had the potential to benefit others which he said motivated him as well.
“Receiving that recognition, that, ‘Oh, yeah, you are one of the top five graduate student teams (and) we think that your invention is going to help society, is going to do something, actually.’ That also added to all the other efforts that we (made),” he said.
