AgBiome’s research is focused on developing biological pest control solutions for the following crops: maize, sorghum, banana and yam.
AgBiome, the leader in developing innovative products from the Earth’s microbial communities, announced the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has continued their granted support, funding phase 2 research aimed to develop novel, efficacious, safe and low cost of production microbial pesticides (fungal control and nematicide) for smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan African countries. AgBiome’s research is focused on developing biological pest control solutions for the following crops: maize, sorghum, banana and yam.
The overarching goal of this project is to leverage AgBiome’s scientific expertise, infrastructure, and previous success developing biological fungicides to develop microbial solutions that will benefit small-holder farmers in African countries.
AgBiome has successfully achieved milestones in phase 1 of this project, including:
- Successfully developing microbial screening assays against the target diseases
- Identification of 100 microbial strains with confirmed activity against one or more of the target fungal diseases and 25 strains prioritised for further evaluation.
- Identification of 20 nematicidal bacterial strains able to control the root knot nematodes (RKN) on-plant and three lead strains prioritized for further evaluation.
In phase 2 of this research, AgBiome will focus on the evaluation of the strains prioritised in the phase 1 of the project under appropriate field conditions and select microbes with the best efficacy.
“Upon completion of phase 2, AgBiome will provide production-ready lead and backup strains with proven efficacy to control a spectrum of fungal diseases and nematodes in the key sub-Saharan African crops,” said Dave Ingham, Pre-product Manager at AgBiome.
