Chemical Products

Our detailed and proprietary knowledge of the genetic networks that regulate high-value plant traits has brought with it the opportunity to identify and develop chemical compounds that will activate these pathways when applied to the plant. This represents a new and exciting avenue for the agrochemical industry, which previously has been focused on development of compounds for pest and weed control. We have therefore embarked on a collaboration with Bayer CropSciences to discover and develop chemicals that can enhance tolerance to a range of stresses. An analogy can be drawn with the pharmaceutical industry, whereby gene networks and proteins known to be associated with particular pathologies are identified as drug targets. By comparison, we identify critical components within the plant networks and then screen these against synthetic chemical libraries, to find compounds that regulate the activity of those components. Our approach has significant advantages over the very costly alternative of directly testing hundreds of thousands of compounds on large numbers of plants growing in soil. We have already been successful in using this approach to identify chemistries that will confer drought tolerance both to the Arabidopsis model as well as to commercial crop species.