Agricultural Biotech Cibus Aims to Make Plants More Tolerant
By Heather Chambers
Published: March 27, 2007 (San Diego Daily Transcript)
A group of 20 scientists with agricultural biotechnology company Cibus is trying to change the way farmers across the world harvest their crops.
"We're small but enthusiastic," said Cibus President Keith Walker, who, along with a group of investors, is trying to push the company's first product into the market.
Cibus formed in November 2001 as a spin-off of the plant and industrial products division of European-American biotech company ValiGen N.V.
"We spun out to take this technology forward, outside the biomedical base," Walker said.
Called gene conversion technology, Cibus scientists have discovered what they say is an all-natural, environmentally safe "smart breeding tool" that helps farmers grow herbicide-tolerant plants without relying on genetic modification.
Some European countries and agricultural groups have shunned genetically modified crops, arguing they require more pesticides, provide lower yields and cause widespread contamination.
Unlike transgenic engineering, which takes exotic genetic material from one species and inserts it into another, Cibus' technology derives its genetic traits from the same plant species being altered. In other words, no foreign DNA is introduced, making it an attractive solution to the agricultural community and parts of the world such as Europe, where some regions have banned genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.
Walker explained the technology as a kind of spell checker that works through the cell's natural process of gene repair.
Each time a cell copies DNA, it makes "spelling mistakes," also called scrivener errors.
Cibus' technology harnesses the cell's natural DNA repair machinery to correct such spelling mistakes by directing DNA repair enzymes to correct and repair the targeted gene in a specific way to produce a desired trait.
For a crop like sorghum, for example, farmers could eradicate weeds without worrying about the effect it might have on their crops.
"We're in enough of a stressful market that a bit of stress from moisture loss can be very significant," said Bruce Maunder, a research adviser with the National Grain Sorghum Producers Foundation.
Equal parts sorghum and corn are used in the production of ethanol, Maunder said, making the crop not only an important source of feed grain for chickens and cattle but also giving it a potentially lucrative market opportunity in alternative energies.
"I think, more recently, with ethanol and all the congressional talk about future global warming, you're going to see a crop like sorghum become all the more important," he said.
In all, Walker said the company has invested $20 million during the past six years, mostly through licensing partnerships and relationships with key investors.
Such a technology could prove a boon to farmers, he said, because they pay an average of $18 an acre for weed control that "doesn't always work very well."
"For the same price, we give them a product that works better," he said. "We're just another approach that could be taken by a number of other companies to address market opportunities they can't address for a number of other reasons."
