Silent killer: backed by Bill Gates, scientists in a Durham laboratory are working to eliminate a tiny pest that has caused havoc for generations of farmers around the world.

• Author: Williams, Allison
• Position: The Future of North Carolina: AGRICULTURE/LIFE SCIENCES

A researcher at the University of California Davis once borrowed the advertising slogan "Diamonds are forever" for his own work. "Nematodes are forever," he stamped on bumper stickers, and, indeed, generations of farmers have become adept at rotating fields and other tricks to avoid the microscopic roundworms that destroy about 10% of crops worldwide every year.

A dent in the destruction may be in sight. Scientists at biotechnology company AgBiome LLC in Durham say they plan to launch a product in the next few years that will eliminate the root-knot nematode before plants even begin to grow using the galaxy of organisms, bacteria and fungi known as the plant microbiome.

Steve Koenning has seen swaths of soybeans destroyed and the same cotton field attacked by two different types of nematodes. Out of an estimated 30,000 species, most of which are harmless--beneficial even-- about 3,000 attack plants. With help from experts such as Koenning, professor emeritus of plant pathology at N.C. State University, North Carolina farmers have learned to manage the destructive ones.

Christy Wiggins hopes, in the future, such worries won't exist. A scientist at AgBiome, Wiggins is screening thousands of microbes for active strains that could be used as seed coatings, protecting plants from one particular pest: the root-knot nematode.

Dan Tomso is chief scientific officer for AgBiome, which was founded in 2012 and employs 46 people at its new 30,000-square-foot facility in Research Triangle Park. He calls the Triangle, home to at least 28 entrepreneurial companies applying cutting-edge technology to agriculture, the Silicon Valley of ag biotech. More than 80 ag biotech companies employ more than 8,700 workers across the state, according to the N.C. Biotechnology Center.

AgBiome made headlines in August when it raised $34.5 million from investors including Syngenta Ventures, the venture capital arm of Swiss ag biotech giant Syngenta AG, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The company says it has isolated and identified an unprecedented number of microbes. Just as scientists understand more about the human microbiome --the trillions of microscopic creatures living in and on the body--leading to an explosion in diets and supplements to take advantage of it, plants too have a microbiome.

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"It's been an invisible science that's possible now because we have technology that didn't exist even five years ago," says Tomso. "We've studied...