Inhibiting Fungi Growth with Copper-based Solutions

Daniel Lin

Overview

Fungi based microbial plant diseases are among the major causes of agricultural crop loss on a global scale, which threatens the worldwide goal of producing sufficient food to feed the growing world population. It is therefore imperative to control the damage caused by fungi and reduce crop loss. However, agricultural fungi control has been a big challenge. Excessive application of synthetic fungicide in agriculture poses a potential threat to both human health and the balance of the ecosystem. Copper based organic fungicide has been effective in controlling a wide range of fungal diseases on fruit trees and vegetables, although it often results in the damage of the plants due to its narrow therapeutic window. Therefore, if the therapeutic window of copper fungicide can be significantly broadened, it could provide an efficient fungal treatment that is safe for the environment and can be widely used. The study discussed here investigated the impact of copper sulfate, when used as a fungicide, on the growth of a fungal mycelium, mung bean sprout, and young celery. The results indicate that the optimal concentrations of copper sulfate would be at least 30 g/L when used to treat fungi and the timing of application during the stages of the plant growth is critical to maximize the therapeutic window. The study also revealed a new observation of potential growth promotion for fungi if copper fungicide dose is not concentrated enough. These results paved a way to further improve the therapeutic window of copper fungicide through additional explorations such as formulation optimization.

My Story

My research journey a little bit over a year ago, at the start of my sophomore year in high school. One of my school's classes was Research Practicum and it taught us about the research process and allowed us to get hands on experience with our own projects. This was one of my favorite classes during that year because of the interactivity of the project during the relatively dull school year.

When we were first told to come up with ideas for our research projects, I really had no idea what I was going to do. I didn't really have any great areas of expertise that I could expand my knowledge on, but then I thought back to that last summer. I had tried growing my own cucumbers and yellow squash in my backyard for the first time, but it hadn't gone too well.

At first, it seemed okay. The most of the plants had germinated and flowered and you could see that they started bearing small vegetables. They grew at a rapid pace, each plant producing one ripen vegetable per week. But then tragedy struck. I caught sight of powdery, white spots on the leaves of one of my yellow squash plants. I instantly knew that this was the infamous powdery mildew that my father had always complained about when they would appear on the grape leaves in our backyard. I tried applying a organic fungicide I found on the internet but it was ineffective and the mildew eventually spread to many of the other plants in the garden and ended up killing quite a few of them.

Although my harvest wasn't completely ruined, it was still largely limited by the powdery mildew that showed up and infected the vegetable plants. I wanted to be able to prevent things like this from happening, so I thought to myself, "What better way than to do research on it". So it became my research topic and I spent several weeks designing the experimental set up. The actual experiment and data collection only took a few weeks and just a couple more weeks and one or two all-nighters later, I had done my data analysis and written my paper. Probably the most difficult part of this whole experience was the data analysis portion, as I had to manually extract the colors from over 200 images to accurately measure the percent growth of fungal mycelium.

I never really expected to get this far with my research, at least not as far as to present at an event like AJAS. I feel honored to be here and look forward to learning about others' projects and research.