Woburn, Massachusetts, USA
June 24, 2019
Yield10 Bioscience, Inc. (Nasdaq:YTEN), an agricultural bioscience company which uses its “Trait Factory” to develop high value seed traits for the agriculture and food industries, today announced that Kristi Snell, Ph.D., Yield10’s chief science officer, will present at the 3rd Precision CRISPR & NBT AgBio Congress which is being held June 24-26 in San Diego, California.
Dr. Snell will present a talk entitled “Exploring Novel Approaches for Gene Selection and Trait Validation in Crops.” The presentation will be part of the “Novel Approaches Beyond Genomics to Improve Yield, Productivity and Resistance” session which is scheduled from 11:10 am to 12:40 pm local time on June 26.
In her presentation, Dr. Snell will discuss the components of Yield10’s proprietary GRAIN (Gene Ranking Artificial Intelligence Network) platform, highlighting recent advancements. GRAIN integrates advanced metabolic flux modeling with transcriptome network analysis to enable researchers to make predictions about which biochemical reactions in a plant are most likely to achieve targeted performance improvements and identify key regulatory genes to modify to achieve the trait of interest. This approach is leading to the identification of novel targets and combinations of targets for increasing performance in crops.
Dr. Snell will describe several traits that Yield10 has identified using GRAIN and highlight a case study demonstrating the use of the GRAIN platform to identify and rank potential regulatory genes predicted to affect yield and/or oil content in an oilseed crop. In the case study, the modeling was used to generate a ranked list of transcription factors that may impact oil and/or seed yield using expression data from the oilseed crop Camelina sativa. Several of the highest ranked targets generated by the model are known regulators of seed oil content or seed yield, validating the use of the model to identify potentially high value targets. In addition, the model generated and ranked several novel targets, currently uncharacterized plant genes that may represent new leads and intellectual property white space. Researchers at Yield10 believe this approach for new trait discovery can be applied to the key commercial crops including corn, soybean, and canola, as well as numerous other crops where genomic information is available.
“Our presentation highlights exciting advances we have made developing our GRAIN technology platform to identify high-value novel gene targets to improve crop performance,” said Kristi Snell, Ph.D., chief science officer of Yield10 Bioscience. “We are currently also developing ways to utilize our GRAIN platform to identify novel targets for improving compositional traits in crops, where improving oil or protein content would enhance the nutritional profile of the crop. We envision that our approach utilizing our GRAIN platform may provide the basis for forming collaborations with agricultural industry leaders for crops of commercial interest.”
Learn more about the conference at the CRISPR & NTB AgBio Congress 2019 website. On June 26, a copy of Dr. Snell’s slide deck will be available on the Yield10 Bioscience investor relations website.
Topics
Species
