UK-based ag biotech Biographica and Netherlands-based genome-editing specialist Hudson River Biotechnology have joined forces in a partnership designed to tackle crop traits that breeders have struggled to unlock through conventional approaches.
Rather than launching with a catalogue of pre-selected traits, however, the companies are issuing an open call to the industry: bring us the trait you have not solved.
The two companies will be at the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in London on September 22-23, where they plan to begin taking trait challenges from breeders, growers and plant product developers. From these, they will select an initial group of projects to scope jointly.
The pitch targets a familiar problem for breeding programmes: an attractive trait may have stalled because no sufficiently promising gene has been identified, existing resistance has broken down, or breeders have been unable to find a viable genetic route to a desired quality characteristic.
From finding the gene to producing the plant
The partnership aims to bridge two stages of crop development that the companies argue rarely sit under one roof.
Biographica identifies the causal genetics behind a desired trait, ranks potential targets according to their likelihood of working in the customer’s crop and designs the DNA change intended to deliver the desired phenotype.
Hudson River then deploys those changes using its genome-editing and BioMaas single-cell regeneration platform, with the aim of producing plants that breeders can take into commercial programmes.
For customers, the proposition is essentially a single route from an unsolved trait ambition to an edited plant, instead of having to work separately with a target-discovery company and a genome-editing specialist.
“By bringing those capabilities together, we want to move genome editing beyond the obvious targets and unlock traits that breeding has not yet been able to crack,” said Lotte Westerhof, CSO of Hudson River Biotechnology.
Going beyond the ‘obvious’ genome-editing targets
The companies see a particular opportunity in traits where the answer cannot simply be pulled from existing scientific literature.
Hudson River already identifies targets from published research for well-studied traits. But the partners argue that many commercially interesting breeding ambitions are harder: the causal gene may not yet have been identified, for example, or an obvious target may be covered by intellectual property that makes it commercially unattractive.
This is where Biographica’s computational biology comes in. Its models are designed to use biological and trait data to identify causal genes and predict the genetic changes most likely to produce commercially relevant phenotypes.
Hudson River can then translate the proposed change into a physical plant. The companies say its approach can produce transgene-free, genetically uniform plants in a single generation.
Can genome editing tackle the traits breeding hasn’t cracked?
“Hudson River is one of very few companies that can edit crops as difficult as strawberry, transgene-free and at a scale our clients depend on,” said Dominic Hall, CEO of Biographica.
“Put those together and a customer can bring us a trait problem and get the whole way to a plant, which is not something either of us could offer alone.”
The ambition is therefore to push genome editing beyond relatively well-understood traits, where developers already know which gene they want to alter, towards problems where discovering what to edit is itself a substantial part of the challenge.
Tomato first, with vegetables and soft fruit to follow
The first projects will focus on tomato, where both companies already have experience, before broadening into other vegetables and soft fruit crops.
The partners are also exploring more sophisticated editing strategies, including changes to regulatory DNA that controls when and where genes are active.
Such approaches could potentially be useful where completely switching off a gene produces the desired characteristic but also creates an undesirable trade-off, such as a yield penalty. Instead, editing regulatory regions could offer more precise control over how a gene behaves.
For now, however, Biographica and Hudson River are deliberately starting with the problems rather than prescribing the solutions.
Their message to breeders arriving in London is simple: what is the trait in your breeding programme that you have been unable to crack?
