Evogene and Biogemma enter collaboration to develop drought tolerant corn
Evogene and Biogemma announced a collaboration to jointly develop commercial corn lines with improved tolerance to drought. Corn, one of the three global crops which "feed the world", matures during the peak summer months and requires significant amounts of water for optimum yield. Summer heat waves and drought spells are a major concern, often significantly reducing corn yield and creating billions of dollars in lost revenues for the growers. With the threat of global warming, scientists are facing a major hurdle: creating a more sustainable agriculture which will produce enough food with less water in order to feed a constantly growing population.
Therefore, one of the most attractive target traits in the agro-biotechnology field is limiting yield losses in crops due to 'less than optimal' environmental conditions. For the past few years Evogene has been very active in this area. To date, and as part of Evogene's abiotic stress tolerance program, the company has identified a set of novel gene candidates that have been shown to provide high tolerance to adverse environmental conditions in a number of model crops.
Drought resistance is known to be one on the most difficult traits to assess. Biogemma has developed different genomic approaches to define the best product. It includes gene candidates, expression and germplasm interaction in particular.
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