Missouri Ag Connection - Plastomics Enters Agreement with Amfora for Soybean Protein Enhancement

Missouri Ag News Headlines

Plastomics Enters Agreement with Amfora for Soybean Protein Enhancement
Missouri Ag Connection - 04/07/2021

Plastomics, a plant biotechnology company making more effective and sustainable crops by delivering valuable traits to the chloroplast, has entered into an agreement with Amfora, Inc., which is developing crops with enhanced nutritional content.

Plastomics is a development stage agricultural company utilizing novel plant transformation technology that takes advantage of the crop's solar engine--the chloroplast--to introduce traits and overcome challenges with traditional biotech trait introduction. Plastomics' trait delivery technology increases the pace, magnitude, and sustainability of agricultural innovation while also reducing the cost to bring new products to market.

Amfora is building a platform of technologies that enhances the nutritional density of food and feed crops. The company is applying these technologies to develop a pipeline of products aimed at meeting the growing global demand for foods that are high in protein while enhancing sustainability. Amfora is initially focused on developing soy as a scalable, low-cost high-density protein source for aquaculture feed, for plant-based meat and for other animal protein replacements.

Under the terms of the agreement, Plastomics will use its proprietary transformation technologies to introduce Amfora gene-editing constructs into high performance soybean germplasm. Financial terms were not disclosed.

"Plastomics provides Amfora with the benefits of commercial savvy and advanced capability for soybean transformation with timelines that will accelerate our R&D objectives," said Michael Lassner, Ph.D., Amfora's Chief Science Officer.

Jeffrey Staub, Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer of Plastomics noted that Plastomics will use its state-of-the-art transformation capabilities to help Amfora speed the development of Amfora's high-protein soybean products.

"These are capabilities we utilize every day as a part of the advancement of our novel chloroplast transformation platform," he said. "Our collaborations with biotech companies like Amfora allows us to help small and mid-size companies accelerate their pipelines while we grow our own technology platform.

Other Missouri Headlines