Yield10 Bioscience Inc., an agricultural bioscience company, on Aug. 11 announced that it has signed a three-year non-exclusive research agreement with GDM, a company specialized in plant genetics based in Gibson City, Illinois, to evaluate novel yield traits in soybean.

Under the agreement, GDM plans to work with Yield10 yield traits within its research and development program for soybean as a strategy to improve soybean yield performance and sustainability.  The research agreement includes three novel crop yield traits in the first phase with the potential to expand the program to more traits in the future. In greenhouse and/or field tests performed by Yield10 to date, these novel traits have shown a range of promising activities relevant to soybean such as improved vigor, increased photosynthesis and/or increased seed yield.  

Both Yield10 and GDM intend to explore forming a broader collaboration to leverage Yield10’s GRAIN trait gene discovery platform and GDM’s rapid trait editing capabilities in elite varieties for the discovery, development and launch of novel soybean performance traits.

“Yield10’s unique approach to trait discovery utilizing its ‘Trait Factory’ has produced a significant portfolio of yield traits with promising activities that are appealing to us for testing in our elite soybean germplasm,” said André Beló, Ph.D., new breeding techniques manager at GDM. “GDM uses advanced research and breeding technologies, such as genome editing and genome selection and we believe there may be significant opportunities to develop new performance traits to complement our capabilities in plant breeding. We look forward to working with the Yield10 team to develop new varieties of high yielding soybean.”  

Kristi Snell, chief science officer of Yield10 Bioscience commented, “We look forward to supporting the research team at GDM as we enable their evaluation of new traits in soybean. Yield10 has demonstrated capability using our GRAIN platform to identify novel traits that exhibit significant potential for producing yield benefits in soybean and other oilseed crops. This partnership with GDM will provide insights critical to improving the performance of soybean.”  

“Working with major companies like GDM that lead innovation in the agriculture sector to test new traits identified using our Trait Factory in crops like soybean is fundamental to our strategy of creating option value for our traits in the major crops,” said Oliver Peoples, Ph.D., president and CEO of Yield10 Bioscience. “In addition to its North American seed operations, GDM has extensive research, plant breeding, testing and crop development operations in Argentina and Brazil, which may provide a path to rapid commercial deployment. We are very pleased to have GDM engaged testing our traits in their germplasm and anticipate continuing to explore ways of working together more broadly in the development of additional performance traits in soybean.”