Amatera, a plant breeding startup founded in 2022, says it can take much of the time and money out of developing new crop varieties by screening candidates as single plant cells instead of as whole plants.
Breeders today usually turn cells into plants first and then genotype them to see what they have. Amatera isolates the cells one from another, grows each in plant cell culture at lab scale, identifies the cell lines of interest and regenerates only those into plants for nursery and field testing. Chief executive Omar Dekkiche told AgFunderNews this "removed the screening bottleneck".
The company creates genetic variation by physical and chemical means, which gives it a large library of non-GMO cell lines that it sequences and screens. The same automated screening can be applied to lines made by other methods, such as gene editing. Dekkiche said the company is still gathering lab data on the savings, but expects at least five times lower cost and half the time compared with conventional methods.
Screening at cell level works for traits with a known genetic marker. Caffeine is one, because the cells carry the metabolism that makes it. Dekkiche said there is no clear cell-level screen yet for drought tolerance or yield, and the company does not promise one.
Its first crops are coffee and grapes. In coffee it is working on naturally caffeine-free varieties and on "Robustica", a coffee meant to taste like Arabica with the robustness of Robusta; new quality genes are in validation and the market is some time away. In grapes it is breeding wine varieties resistant to downy and powdery mildew, the main fungal problem for vines in Europe.
The company, co-founded by Dekkiche and chief technology officer Lucie Kriegshauser, is combining cell biology with robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence in one device meant to run plant cell regeneration on its own. It raised a seed round this year and won a place on the European Union-backed EIC Accelerator in June. It plans to move into annual staple crops with seed company partners it has not yet named.
AgFunderNews notes that its parent company, AgFunder, is an investor in Amatera. The interview was conducted by Elaine Watson at the World Agri-Tech event in London.
Photo: Jeevan Jose, Kerala, India / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: AgFunderNews
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