The art of grafting is manually performed by a skilled workforce, which is costly and time-consuming. A 15-20 % of grafts fail due to common pathogen infections or improper healing of the wound area (Agromillora Iberia S.L., personal communication). Currently farmers use grafting tape to cover the union. Commercially available tapes for this purpose are flexible, self-adhesive and biodegradable. Although useful, they are expensive and do not ensure graft success. In fact, very few improvements have been introduced in this field, and plant nurseries are extremely interested in novel material/solutions providing support and protection to the wounded area (Agromillora Iberia S.L., personal communication). Therefore, we offer a novel material, PLANT HEALING (PH), which could be implemented in current grafting protocols with no extra time or effort to significantly improving graft efficiency and process efficiency. PLANTHEALING will make an agricultural breakthrough, by developing a new nanocomposite material containing silver nanoparticles linked to bacterial cellulose. This idea has been submitted as a Spanish Patent (May 2016). The initial patentability study was performed by an official patent office which confirmed novelty and innovation. Preliminary experiments to produce this material have been performed. The working team is currently seeking for additional fundign to go on working on this project; currently, the project is at index of readiness of 2. To develop PH we divided the tasks in two differentiated areas: I) Experimental and II) Business.
