Wageningen, The Netherlands
November 9, 2009

Ankur Seeds Pvt. Ltd., a renowned family-owned seed company in India, has recently signed a contract with KeyGene, a technology based company from the Netherlands, to accelerate their field crop breeding programs to meet the requirements of the future market.

The use of KeyGene’s state of the art molecular breeding tools in breeding programs will help Ankur Seeds to bring its variety and hybrid development to a next level. It will significantly increase the precision and reduce time of breeding. Exploring and exploiting India’s large natural germplasm with biotechnology tools has an enormous potential for the generation of new traits in important food crops. The techniques that will be used do not require regulatory clearance and are safe to the environment and human beings. The use of molecular breeding technologies will give Ankur Seeds a competitive advantage in the Indian seed market.

Commenting on the collaboration, V.S. Dagaonkar, Vice President Research at Ankur Seeds says: “KeyGene's state-of-the-art technologies are perfectly suitable to boost our field crop breeding programs. Also KeyGene’s large experience in working together with researchers and breeders from various seed companies is an important asset to implement new molecular breeding approaches at our company”.

M.G. Shembekar, Ankur Seeds Managing Director, adds: “This collaboration is a confirmation of Ankur Seeds’ commitment to be one of the front-players in India. The molecular genetic understanding of our proprietary germplasm combined with our rapid commercialization capabilities will enable us to speed up the introduction of new varieties on the market”.

Herco van Liere, Business Development Manager at KeyGene: “The collaboration with Ankur Seeds emphasizes our ambition to work in a strategic manner with innovative breeding companies in various areas of the world. Together with seed companies that can adopt our molecular breeding strategies, we will make significant improvement in the development of new crop varieties”.

Edwin van der Vossen, Team Leader Field Crops at KeyGene, adds: “Our challenge lies in applying the molecular marker know-how to Ankur Seeds’ breeding programs and to support the generation of new varieties in a fast and cost-effective way. Our expertise and innovative new generation crop sequencing strategies will generate know-how beyond publicly available data and support a sequence-based breeding approach on the lead crops of Ankur Seeds”.

Ankur Seeds Pvt Ltd is an agribusiness company dealing with agricultural crops. Established in 1976 at Nagpur, Maharashtra, it launched its research and development activities in 1978 & received recognition from DSIR Government in India in 1992-1993. The objective of the research and development unit was and is to produce high yielding economical hybrids and varieties to suit the farmers’ needs. The company received the National award for excellent research and development achievements in 1996.

KeyGene NV is a R&D company with the mission to be the leading company in developing and applying DNA expertise in the field of molecular genetics with a focus on crop plants. KeyGene’s up to date R&D facilities with next generation sequencing platforms, an extensive computational infrastructure and long experience in working with plant genomes form the firm basis of the Crop Genome Center, which focuses on the development of high quality genome assemblies of 6F crops. KeyGene exploits its proprietary technologies, databases and know-how through strategic alliances, contract research and products for applications in the plant breeding industry. KeyGene has its headquarters in Wageningen, The Netherlands, a subsidiary in Rockville Maryland, USA and a joint lab at the Shanghai Institute of Biological Sciences in Shanghai, China.

KeyGene is a registered trademark of Keygene N.V.

Website: http://www.keygene.com

Published: November 9, 2009