Reference

Agri-inputs & biocontrol

Why an inoculant works where the niche is empty, why formulation outvotes the strain, and where a category name outruns the evidence behind it.

Fifteen subjects that share one uncomfortable fact: the product is a population, and it is regulated as one. A microbial inoculant does not act like an active ingredient — it establishes, competes and persists, which is why it works where the niche is empty (silage has no competitors; a mycorrhizal hypha helps where the soil’s own fungi are not already there) and why a consortium assembled in vitro stops being that community within a week of reaching soil.

The second recurring idea: delivery decides before biology does. A seed coating is decided by drying, binder and shelf life rather than by the strain; RNAi is precise to the nucleotide but limited to whether the RNA ever reaches the cytoplasm; mating disruption works across an area and fails on a plot for reasons of scale, not chemistry.

The third: several categories here are defined by claimed effect, not by mechanism — biostimulants above all — and the pages distinguish the two wherever the evidence allows.

Start with biofertilizers and biopesticides; it frames the population logic that the specific pages — pheromones, RNAi, endophytes, silage — keep re-encountering.

  • Bee health biopreparations Insect innate immunity, vitellogenin as a carrier, the unusually simple honeybee gut microbiome — and why any product's effect is hard to measure at colony level.
  • Microbial terroir engineering in viticulture Arbuscular symbiosis and the phosphorus depletion zone, elicitors of the phenylpropanoid pathway in grape skin — and why a causal link from soil community to wine flavour remains unproven.
  • Bioherbicides and ecological weed control Three unrelated mechanisms under one word — contact membrane disruption, inundative infection by a fungal pathogen, and natural molecules that inhibit an enzyme — and why only the third reaches synthetic-grade potency.
  • Biostimulants Humic substances, seaweed extracts, protein hydrolysates and microbes under the single legal label PFC 6 of Regulation (EU) 2019/1009 — their unrelated mechanisms, and the one condition under which any effect appears at all.
  • Peptide crop protection Insecticidal spider-venom peptides, cationic antimicrobial peptides and plant elicitor peptides — three different targets and one shared constraint: delivery and proteolysis.
  • Pheromones and semiochemicals in crop protection How a male finds a female by odour plume, the three mechanisms that break that search, and why the effect depends on pest density and on the size of the treated block.
  • RNAi biopesticides The Dicer-2 and RISC pathway, why systemic RNAi works in beetles and poorly in moths, nuclease degradation, and sequence homology as the real substance of the risk assessment.
  • Soil microbiome: what is actually measured What sits behind a soil microbiome test: spatial variability, the compositional nature of sequencing, relic DNA, the gap between taxonomy and function — and why an introduced strain rarely establishes.
  • Bio seed coatings The seed coat as a carrier for a living culture: adhesion, water activity, survival of desiccation and incompatibility with chemical seed treatments — the four constraints that set the ceiling.
  • Biofertilizers and biopesticides An umbrella category unified by acting through a living organism rather than by any common biology: target specificity, viable count as the specification, shelf life, and the asymmetry in registration requirements.
  • Biological nitrification inhibitors How root exudates inhibit ammonia monooxygenase in nitrifying bacteria, what the Brachiaria and sorghum work actually showed, and how dose, soil persistence and ammonia-oxidising archaea set the limits.
  • Endophytic microbes as an agricultural product The mechanisms of endophytic colonisation — entry routes, evasion of plant immunity, ACC deaminase and the suppression of stress ethylene — and the difference between a seed-transmitted symbiont and an inoculant that has to be reapplied.
  • Mycorrhizal inoculants The biology of arbuscular symbiosis: why the mycorrhizal phosphate pathway works, why the fungus cannot be grown without a host, and why the response to an inoculant is large only in disturbed and phosphorus-poor soils.
  • Silage biopreparations The biochemistry of ensiling: homofermentative lactic acid bacteria and the pH drop that stops clostridia, and the dry-matter loss that Lactobacillus buchneri trades for aerobic stability.
  • Synthetic microbial consortia for soil Why division of labour and cross-feeding make a consortium outperform a monoculture, and why competitive exclusion, priority effects and evolutionary burden prevent it from holding its composition in the field.