Over millions of years, plants have evolved close relationships with the microorganisms in their environment. These relationships can be highly beneficial to plants and improve health and growth. Targeted application of microorganisms that engage in these beneficial relationships can boost the fitness of crops in a natural way.
Microorganisms can support plants in different ways, which is reflected in Aphea.Bio's product development strategy. We focus on microbial strains that improve plant nutrient uptake (biostimulants) and strains that protect against disease (biocontrol). Our mission is to provide farmers with innovative and sustainable solutions to reduce fertilizer and pesticide use.
Unravelling complex interactions and identifying beneficial microbial strains requires solid scientific insights. To this end Aphea.Bio has developed an innovative R&D platform bundling different technologies in bio-informatics and microbiome mapping, state-of-the-art microorganism culturing, high-throughput crop phenotyping and data analysis.
Aphea.Bio is in a unique position to deliver novel and powerful solutions to the market thanks to its innovative R&D platform which bundles several unique technologies together to create a high-throughput pipeline for discovering new biocontrol and biostimulant products for a variety of crops such as row crops as well as fruit & vegetables.
We start our search for new products by opening the untapped microbial space and looking for novel microorganism species and consortia. By relying on these unique, non-standard microorganisms, we use what nature has given us:
the natural diversity generated during millions of years of evolution.
Having screened more than 100,000 microbial strains, we open a previously untapped source of innovation for biologicals that others cannot access.
To be successful, you need to know what you are looking for. Whether looking for the next biocontrol or biostimulant product, in planta validation of activity for our discovery hits is a crucial step in ensuring success. With cutting-edge approaches, such as high-throughput, automated plant phenotyping, and AI-based disease scoring algorithms, we assess activity at an unparalleled precision and speed. Combining our in-house data mining capabilities and expertise, we evaluate thousands of discovery leads per year and can identify those that really make a difference for plants.
Knowing how our candidates perform in the field is one of the most important aspects when developing new products.
Our in-house team of experienced field trial managers and scientific experts implements an extensive field trial program, starting in the early phases of our pipeline process. In combination with our in-house data management and statistics system, we can perform in-depth analysis of our data and efficiently steer our development process to find the best products for the farmers' fields.
Having a promising candidate in the pipeline will not get you to the finish line of having a stable and safe product. We combine all key aspects of microbiology, focus on developing tailor-made production methods specific to each strain and finding the ultimate formulation to bring product efficacy to its best.
Our approach to developing new products ensures that potential 'red flags' are spotted already in the research phase. High-quality data complying with regulatory requirements is generated early in the process, thus allowing us for an efficient and fast submission of product dossiers to bring our products to the market as soon as possible – on a global scale.