Microfluidics for sustainable biotech developments

S. MONTAGNA; PIRES MONTEIRO M.; A.R. LODEIRO; M. L. CORDERO; V.I. MARCONI

Rio de janeiro

Workshop; I Brazil-Argentina Microfluidics Congress / VIII Workshop in Microfluidics; 2018

PUC

Bio-fertilizers are substances which contains living microorganisms, as bacteria, which when applied to seeds,plants, or soil, colonizes the rhizosphere or the interior of the plants and promotes plant growth by increasingthe supply of nutrients to the host plant. Bio-fertilizers, biotechnological developments present since decades inthe market are essential components of organic farming that play vital role in maintaining long term soil fertilityand sustainability. They are extensively used and very cheap, but are far from being as effective as chemicalfertilizers. Therefore, they offer many challenges for basic research in agriculture science. Here is wheremicrofluidics could play a key role, offering transparent, biocompatible and cheap micro-devices as tools tostudy soil bacteria and to better understand its transport properties, in a laboratory.In this work we present numerical predictions of confined Bradyrhizobium diazoefficiens behavior[Montagna2018], a bi-flagellar bacteria used extensively as bio-fertilizer. We model them using realisticparameters from our recent reports on its motilities [Quelas et at, Sci.Rep. 2016]. Brady ́s dynamics andtransport was studied versus diverse mono-dispersed, bi-dispersed and poly-dispersed disorder systems,imitating different porosities. As well, we investigated its transport properties for several Brady strains, whichdiffer in their flagellar system. Recent experimental results will be shown. These preliminary in vitro studieshopefully will be useful for further developments in a sustainable agronomy.Key-Words: microfluidics, soil, confinement, bacteria, porous