Ohalo™ has unveiled Boosted Breeding™, a groundbreaking plant breeding technology poised to revolutionize agriculture by significantly improving crop productivity and sustainability. This innovation mirrors the impact of hybrid plant breeding systems discovered in the early twentieth century, promising to unlock unprecedented yields, enhance agronomic practices, and increase the adaptability and resilience of various crops.
"The demands on agriculture have never been greater, with estimates that global food production must increase by at least 50% over the next 25 years, according to the UN," said Dave Friedberg, CEO of Ohalo. "Boosted Breeding will accelerate agricultural adaptation and increase productivity, helping crops survive and thrive in new environments while reducing the cost and footprint of agriculture."
Boosted Breeding Technology:
Ohalo's Boosted Breeding system allows each parent plant to pass its entire genome to its offspring, rather than a random half. This results in Boosted™ offspring plants possessing an expanded genome with all the genes from both parents, leading to several key benefits:
- Combining Beneficial Traits: Traditional plant breeding involves passing a random half of the genes to offspring, making it difficult and time-consuming to combine beneficial traits. Boosted plants inherit all beneficial traits from both parents, leading to immediate improvements in crops.
- Increased Health and Growth: With a larger genome, Boosted plants exhibit improved genetic diversity and novel gene networks, resulting in healthier, faster-growing plants with yield gains of 50-100%+ in early trials.
- Genetically Uniform True Seed™: For crops usually propagated vegetatively, Boosted Breeding enables scalable seed-based planting systems. True Seed™ systems carry lower disease risk and are more cost-effective and time-efficient.
The Boosted Breeding discovery stems from nearly five years of research into plant reproductive biology, altering reproductive circuits in parent plants using Ohalo's proprietary proteins and process. This precision in plant breeding delivers improved varieties faster than ever before.
"We founded Ohalo on the premise that we could significantly accelerate and improve existing breeding systems and crop outcomes by changing a plant's reproductive system," said Ohalo CTO, Jud Ward. "This technology will eliminate many challenges agriculture faces and bring previously unimaginable benefits for farmers and consumers."
Boosted Breeding not only combines beneficial traits and increases yield but also introduces new agronomic systems for vegetatively propagated crops, reducing costs and disease vulnerability.
"Boosted plants produce genetically uniform true seeds, enabling the creation of new seed industries in crops like potatoes," said Friedberg. "We're going to radically transform crop growing, making new seed varieties commercially available for farmers, improving yield, resilience, adaptability, and nutrition."
Ohalo is already applying Boosted Breeding across various crops, including potatoes, corn, and berries. The company is developing Boosted crop programs both internally and through industry partnerships, with plans to expand to other crops and regions. For more information about Ohalo, visit www.ohalo.com.
