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Maintaining the performance of Biological Control Agents (BCA) over time is a major concern for enterprises. The basic idea of this work package is to study the different traits in the population of specific insects and mites and select the most efficient lines in terms of survival, fecundity and production.

In Colbics, the enterprises that decided to involve specific R&D efforts on BCA production optimisation will perform experiments testing the impact of several production methods performed in controlled conditions. More specifically, they will study the impacts in terms of nutrition, genetic variability and production protocols in controlled conditions.

The results of these experiments will allow the definition of optimized BCA production methods, reducing production costs, increasing BCA food/host quality and increasing BCA performances. They will also directly develop simple tools (genotyping, phenotypic measures) for the quality control of BCA productions.