Plantik Biosciences and Hudson River Biotechnology have agreed to work together on heat tolerance in crops, starting with strawberries. Their stated aim is a validated heat-tolerance trait that any strawberry breeder can license, and validation trials are already under way.

The problem they are tackling is the growing number of extreme heat events. Plantik cofounder and chief executive Ying Shao calls heat tolerance "a must-have trait for many crops across the globe". Strawberries are among the most exposed: high temperatures disrupt flowering and fruit set and damage the quality of the fruit.

The two companies bring different pieces. France-based Plantik uses its ATLANTIS machine-learning platform to search what it calls "the dark genome", the regulatory stretches of plant DNA that switch genes on and off, and then edits those regions without inserting foreign DNA. Its first product is a heat-tolerant tomato, which the company says it developed in about 12 months instead of the five to eight years of conventional breeding, and it is running demonstrations in greenhouses and fields in the United States and Belgium.

Hudson River's BioMaas platform offers breeders genome editing without building the research capacity in-house; so far the company has concentrated on tomatoes and strawberries. In the partnership, Plantik identifies which parts of the strawberry genome to edit for heat tolerance and Hudson River makes the edits in the plants. Chief executive Fernando Los says strawberry is harder than tomato because it is an octoploid species that is normally propagated as clones, so the work has to be done directly in commercial germplasm.

Los says recent changes to EU rules that simplify the regulation of CRISPR editing have brought "a surge of interest" in the business, and that breeders outside the largest seed companies rarely have the money or staff to run a full editing workflow themselves. "If you reduce the failure rate from 90% to maybe 10% for a breeder, that's a very good proposition to offer them," he said.

Strawberry is the starting point; the companies plan to take the approach to other crops later and are inviting other firms to bring trait problems for their own strawberry varieties. AgFunderNews notes that its parent company, AgFunder, is an investor in Plantik. The report was written by Jennifer Marston.

Photo: USDAgov / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

Source: AgFunderNews