UK startup Biographica and the Dutch genome-editing company Hudson River Biotechnology have agreed a partnership that will take crop trait development the whole way from finding a gene target to delivering an edited commercial variety. The two firms will begin with tomatoes and then move into other crops.

The arrangement pairs Biographica's computational platform, which identifies and ranks the genes behind traits ranging from disease resistance to drought tolerance, with Hudson River's genome-editing, transformation and regeneration capabilities. Biographica designs the edits; Hudson River makes them in the plant through its BioMaas editing and single-cell regeneration workflow.

Dominic Hall, who co-founded Biographica in 2022 with Cecily Price, said the model is aimed at breeders who have run out of obvious targets, lack the data to find a good one, or need to work around another company's patents. "It's a case of bring us your most difficult trait problems," he told AgFunderNews. A customer would approach Hudson River, which would draw on Biographica's predictions to nominate the priority genes to edit; the customer stays Hudson River's, and the two companies share the costs and any upside behind the scenes.

Hall said many breeding programmes still rely on genome-wide association studies and quantitative trait loci mapping, which link DNA variants to traits statistically but prove correlation rather than causation and do not rank the candidate genes. Biographica's platform uses multi-modal machine learning, built on foundation models trained on genomic data, to predict which genes most influence a trait, how they interact, and which are likely to be edited with the fewest side effects. Results from the laboratory are fed back into the models.

Beyond simple knockouts, the company is developing models that predict how an edit would change gene expression in particular tissues or conditions. Hall said that matters for so-called susceptibility genes, which pathogens exploit but which also play a part in normal plant development, so that switching them off can cost yield. "We ask can we modulate expression of these genes in specific contexts so we can reduce the susceptibility of the plant without having a yield penalty," he said, adding that such edits could also give more durable disease resistance.

Lotte Westerhof, chief scientific officer at Hudson River Biotechnology, said the aim was to "move genome editing beyond the obvious targets and unlock traits that breeding has not yet been able to crack". Hall noted that Hudson River is one of few companies able to edit crops as difficult as strawberry, transgene-free and at commercial scale.

Biographica, which also works with large clients such as BASF and is pursuing traits in-house, recently closed a £7 million ($9.5 million) seed round led by Faber VC. Hall said disease resistance is currently the strongest demand signal from breeders, with further opportunities in crop quality and nutrition. Reporting by Elaine Watson.

Source: AgFunderNews