Emerging from stealth last year with a cool $100 million in funding, plant breeding startup Ohalo has generated a lot of buzz with its ‘boosted breeding’ technology. So what is it, and why is it creating what CEO Dave Friedberg calls a “Holy Shit” moment for breeders?
Speaking to AgFunderNews at the World Agri-Tech summit in San Francisco yesterday, Friedberg gave us the lowdown on the approach, which effectively ensures the progeny of two plants will get all the traits of interest by ensuring that both parents pass on their entire genome to their offspring.
Uniform seed
The tech, which deploys proteins to effectively switch off the mechanism that splits the genes in each parent, is a potential gamechanger in the crop breeding world, claims Friedberg, as the resulting plants contain all the beneficial traits from both parents, rather than a random half of the traits from each parent.
Strikingly, plants bred with the tech have also been shown to have significantly higher yields, says the startup, which was formed in 2019 by Friedberg’s investment company and venture foundry The Production Board.
As its process delivers the entire genome from each of the boosted parent plants, every seed they produce is genetically identical, explained Friedberg. As a result, Ohalo’s technology can enable the production of uniform seed for farmers, replacing traditional methods of vegetative propagation still used in many crop systems, saving time and money.
Take potatoes, said Friedberg. They produce seeds, but they are all genetically different, so most potatoes are grown from other potatoes (“seed potatoes”), which are cut into smaller pieces and planted.
“For the first time ever, we can create true potato seeds and that’s never been done before.
“We’re coming up on the 100 year anniversary of hybrid breeding, and we think boosted breeding is almost as significant in terms of the impact it could have, and importantly, it can have impact not just on a limited set of crops, but on pretty much all crops.”
Three key benefits
According to Friedberg, the tech has three key benefits.
“One is precision breeding, so you can control what you’re putting together, and you get exactly the combination of the mother and the father, so you can stack traits, and you know what you’re going to get when you make a cross.
“The second is you can make true seed, because every seed will now have the exact same genetics. You can make seed in crops where we can’t use seed, and it’s very difficult or impossible to inbreed and do hybridization.
“The third is higher yields. So it turns out that when you make selections from distinct parents that have very different genes or very different alleles, the yield goes through the roof.”
Further reading:
Tropic to launch non-browning bananas in March, extended shelf-life bananas by year-end
