The following is an excerpt.
Producing food will undoubtedly get more difficult and expensive as the combined challenges of climate change and scarce energy resources start to bite, but venom from poisonous spiders has inspired new technologies which can help to solve the problem of feeding the world’s growing population.
The ever-increasing demand for food is attracting investment to fund new agricultural technologies, resulting in a new generation of pesticides based on how spiders kill their prey being developed by the US company Vestaron.
The initial product is being targeted at high-value crops, but the peptides in question are not collected from millions of individual spiders.
“We take peptides and introduce it to yeast, and the yeast produces more peptides which we then harvest.”
Read the full article here: Spider venom inspires new farming methods
