Swadeshmukul Santra’s research into citrus greening is featured in a new article from The Huffington Post.
The race is on to find an effective treatment for citrus greening, a ruinous disease that has decimated citrus industries across the world and brought global orange production to the lowest levels seen in generations.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars looking for a cure — and the University of Central Florida says associate professor Swadeshmukul Santra may have found one.
Santra’s solution is a zinc-based bactericidal spray he calls Zinkicide; it addresses citrus greening by targeting the bacteria that cause the disease. Because those bacteria live deep within the wood of the tree, targeting them requires chemical structures small enough to penetrate the outer layers. Santra developed Zinkicide using nanotechnology to make its particles smaller than a single microscopic cell, and it has already shown great promise in the treatment of citrus canker, another nasty disease.