Benson Hill Biosystems and RiceTec have inked a licensing agreement that will allow RiceTec to use Benson Hill’s proprietary gene editing technologies to develop new rice hybrids.
The announcement was made prior to the kick off of the Plant and Animal Genome Conference in Shenzhen, China.
“Exploring the integration of Benson Hill’s precision tools and collaborative approach to empowering innovation aligns with our mission to drive food production through rice seed technologies and to ensure superior quality and greater profitability for our growers,” Dario Bernacchi, RiceTec director of traits and technology, said in a news release.
RiceTec began developing hybrid rice seed in 1988, offering the first commercial hybrid rice seed product in 1999.
Benson Hill’s CropOS platform combines machine learning and big data with genome editing and plant biology to predict outcomes and significantly accelerate and simplify product development.
Simply put, the computer platform allows researchers to quickly predict, select and control desirable traits, bypassing generations of experimentation to bring crops to market faster.