AGROCHEMICALS
Microbes forming consortia
an initial 1,400 m 2 of laboratories and offices , with 465 m 2 ready for further expansion .
Company origins
BioConsortia had its origins in BioDiscovery , a New Zealandbased specialist in natural microbial products , which developed expertise in ultra-high-throughput biological and bioactivity screening . The two firms now have a collection of over 70,000 pre-screened and characterised microbes , including 9,000 endophytes , the microbes that reside in plant tissues and have the potential to deliver a benefit throughout the plant . After BioDiscovery invented the AMS process in 2010 and further developed it with funds from Khosla Ventures , it decided to globalise as BioConsortia and moved to Davis , in the heart of the US agroscience industry . Further funding has since been sourced from Khosla and others . In 2014 , Meadows-Smith , formerly CEO of biopesticide firm Agraquest and head of biologics for Bayer CropScience , took over as CEO . He was tempted out of retirement , he says , by finding a company that , he says , “ turned microbial discovery on its head . Its approach to discovery was so unique and remarkable that I really wanted to be part of this .” As well as N-fixation , AMS has been applied to develop biofungicides for a broad range of crop diseases , particularly species that are developing resistance to chemical fungicides ; bionematicides for vegetable and row crops ; and biostimulants , notably for fruit and vegetables . Several products of all three kinds are at the registration stage now and several companies are testing the products . Partnership announcements may follow later this year or in early 2022 .
Technology platform
The company lists six ‘ drivers of success ’. It all starts with a revolutionary R & D platform . The AMS process is core to this because , the company claims , it generates more leads than the top market biologicals , with superior efficacy and higher consistency . There is also a toolbox of microbe tagging , microbiome analysis , genomics and others .
“ In our approach to discovery , we operate more like plant breeders and geneticists than microbiologists ,” Meadows- Smith says . Figure 1 shows how it works , all the way from the original soil samples to microbe isolation . AMS is an iterative process , where the highest performing plants are picked in each round after growing them under stress . In one example related to nitrogen fixing , the soil around cucumber plants was inoculated with the Pythium pathogen , which would typically kill 99.5 % of them . The microbiome of the survivors was transferred to the next generation of seed . In this second round , over half of the plants survived , even with higher levels of Pythium . By the third round , all survived . Each round , took a matter of five to six weeks . “ What we have done is to evolve the plant microbiome and enrich it with beneficial microbes . The next stage is to identify which microbes on the plant were delivering this protection ,” Meadows-Smith says . While other microbiology companies are looking for similar things , he continues , BioConsortia ’ s real differentiator is its starting point . “ We have a library of microbes isolated from high-performing plants that were grown under various stresses , be it a fungal disease , a nematode or nitrogen stress .” The company carries out tests to see what the microbe does , including genomics and DNA sequencing . It has also developed root colonisation as a selection tool , using tags to show where on the plant microbes colonise and under what conditions . Work on root colonisation has yielded insights into how different microbes react to change in soil pH , temperature and structure . In turn this has helped to address some of the recurring issues with biologicals in crop protection : their inconsistency in use and the difficulty in understanding when and why they work best . ‣
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