Biodiesel byproduct could combat cacao disease

In Pennsylvania, scientists at Penn State’s Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences have found that glycerol from biodiesel production can act as a potential alternative to the hazardous antifungal agents currently being used to combat one of the most damaging cacao diseases, Phytophthora pod rot (also known as Black Pod), responsible for an estimated 20 to 30 percent loss in yield annually.

“When you make biodiesel,” researcher Mark Guiltinan says, “you end up with a massive amount of glycerol that nobody really has a good use for, and it’s super cheap because of that.”

Researcher Yufan Zhang adds that the production of glycerol from biofuels “is projected to increase ten-fold in the next ten years, as high as six times the projected demand, and people are already generating excessive amounts of glycerol that they don’t know what to do with. There are journals focusing specifically on the use of glycerol and other biodiesel products, and research is being done on all different kinds of byproducts from the biodiesel industry to find out what how these compounds could be used.”