Hideyoshi Toyoda

Novel electrostatic devices for managing biotic and abiotic nuisances in environments

The protection of crop plants from infection and/or attack by pathogens and pests via safe and environmentally benign methods has been a long-standing goal. Much effort has focused on developing biological and chemical methods to achieve this, including the production of resistant crop plants using conventional and new biotechnological techniques, biocontrol of pathogens and pests using antibacterial, antifungal and entomopathogenic microorganisms, and the screening of biologically synthesised compounds that inhibit growth of the pathogens.1,2 Despite much interesting work, there has been little practical progress because the protective effects are easily destroyed, and because of problems with agent preparation, limited targets for application, and high costs. The principal problems facing practical implementation are the application of individual methods for pathogen and pest control at scales larger than the test experiments, and variable environmental conditions. These trials have taught us that the aforementioned techniques were, in essence, supplementary measures for a limited range of targets under particular conditions. We must reflect on the lack of reliable basic methods that can be combined to form an appropriate approach.1 Once a realistic and reasonable research objective can be settled, it would be possible to advance our steps steadily through a cyclical repetition of creation and destruction of a working hypothesis formulated from the reproducible experimental results and eventually to propose new conceptions for an electrostatic approach. A number of physical methods, especially exploiting electrostatic phenomena, can generate physical forces sufficiently strong to catch airborne fungal spores or small flying insects that may pass through the conventional insect netting used to protect greenhouse crop plants. If an effective force could be generated, such an electrostatic approach would be an extremely promising tool to provide a spore-free and pest-free space for crop plants in a greenhouse environment.3