IPM-4-CITRUS Project

The H2020 European project called IPM-4-CITRUS, for Integrated Pest Management for Citrus, was launched on 27 April 2017 at INSA Toulouse (France). TWB is partner of this project.

Teams of the IPM-4-CITRUS project at INSA Toulouse (France)

IPM-4-Citrus aims to strengthen collaborations between academic and non-academic -industrial- partners based in 3 European Member States (France, Germany, Italy), 2 Associated Countries (Turkey and Tunisia) and 1 Third Country (Lebanon), in order to develop a new biopesticide active against citrus pests and scale it up from lab to market.

The project’s research and innovation activities are based on a multidisciplinary approach, which aims at understanding and sensitising stakeholders about the health risk factors related to citrus pests and their treatment by chemical pesticides and developing an alternative Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approach based on biological control. Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) based biopesticides occupy almost 97% of the world’s biopesticide market and their use was estimated to exceed 30,000 tons. Despite this widespread use, the originality of Citrus-IPM is to focus on 2 promising, newly identified strains (Bt kurstaki BLB1 and LIP), which were shown to be more efficient than the commercial (Bt kurstaki HD1).

In conjunction with validation through field tests, the project will pave the way for future commercial exploitation of a new biopesticide product by drawing up a feasibility study for future spin-off activities and/or new production lines in partner SMEs.

The project, with a total budget of € 0.8M for a four year period, is supported by the LISBP laboratory via the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA), University of Toulouse, France. It includes the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) with TWB.

TWB will be involved in optimizing the microbial toxins production and researching industrial partners for the transfer step.

TWB Contact: Julien Cescut – julien.cescut@insa-toulouse.fr

More information: here