Yield10 Bioscience is an agricultural bioscience company focusing on the development of disruptive technologies to produce step-change improvements in crop yield for food and feed crops to enhance global food security. Experts forecast that food production must be increased by over 70% in the next 35 years to feed the growing global population, which is expected to increase from 7 billion to more than 9.6 billion by 2050. Yield10 is focused on new agricultural biotechnology approaches to improve fundamental elements of plant metabolism through enhanced photosynthetic efficiency and directed carbon utilization. Yield10 is working to develop, validate and commercialize new traits and identify gene editing targets in several key crops including canola, soybean and corn. Yield10 was launched by Metabolix, Inc. in 2015 and is traded on Nasdaq (YTEN). Yield10 is headquartered in Woburn, MA and has an additional agricultural science facility with greenhouses in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.
History
Metabolix was founded in 1992 and focused on engineering microbes to make proprietary bioplastics and bio-based chemicals. In 2002, Metabolix started a crop science research program with the intent to harness the renewable nature of plants to produce renewable bioplastics, chemicals and bioenergy from agricultural crops. Historically, Metabolix put most of its crop technology efforts on developing proprietary systems to produce PHB, the simplest member of the PHA family of biopolymers, in high concentration in the seeds of oilseed crops or in the leaves of biomass crops for these applications.
With development advancing in our agricultural biotechnology approach and with our progress producing PHB in plants, we learned that producing PHB in increasing levels in the biomass of switchgrass resulted in impaired plant growth. This result is not unexpected, as we were diverting a significant fraction of the carbon fixed by the plants into PHB, which represented a new carbon sink. Given these observations and our longer-term goal at the time to develop commercially viable ways to produce PHB biopolymer in switchgrass and the industrial oilseed camelina, we began developing new genetic and informatics tools and began capturing intellectual propertyaround strategies to enhance the photosynthetic capacity of plants.
In 2015, we set a new mission and redeployed our crop science program, launching with the name “Yield10 Bioscience.” It is now developing proprietary, breakthrough plant biotechnologies to improve crop productivity and seed yield based on our “Smart Carbon Grid for Crops” and our metabolic engineering platform called the “T3” Platform. We are now focusing on advanced crop technologies to boost the CO2 fixation efficiency through photosynthesis as well as its direction to and conversion into plant matter. Our team has demonstrated yield improvements inswitchgrass biomass and camelina oilseed, and we are developing innovative agricultural biotechnology approaches in significant row crops to provide novel solutions for global food security.
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2016 Update
Metabolix, Inc. is implementing a strategic plan under which the Company has wound down its legacy PHA biopolymer business and Yield10 Bioscience will become its core business with a focus on developing disruptive technologies for step-change improvements in crop yield. Yield10 is leveraging Metabolixs extensive track record of innovation based around optimizing the flow of carbon intermediates in living systems. Yield10 is working on new approaches to improve fundamental elements of plant metabolism through enhanced photosynthetic efficiency and directed carbon utilization. Yield10 is advancing several yield traits in development in crops such as camelina, canola, soybean and corn. The Company is based in Woburn, MA
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Yield10 Bioscience is a planned spinout that will commercialize crop science innovations that Metabolix and its partners have developed over the last 10+ years. “Yield10” will focus on step changes in crop yield to enhance global food security. This will be achieved through enhanced carbon capture (photosynthesis) and targeted carbon deposition through advanced transcriptome targeted metabolic engineering. Target crops will include key row crops (corn, soybean, canola, sugarcane, sorghum, alfalfa) as well as industrial and energy crops (e.g. Camelina and switchgrass). The increased fixed carbon will be directed to products of interest through Yield10’s advanced metabolic engineering capabilities.
- Oilseed crops – increase carbon flow to seed and oil
Corn – increase carbon flow to seed and starch biosynthesis
Biomass crops – increase carbon flow to sucrose (cane) or biomass
Industrial and energy crops (e.g. Camelina, switchgrass, sugarcane) – increase carbon flow to industrial products (e.g. bioplastics)
Yield10 Bioscience: The Innovation Opportunity
A complex trait such as increased crop yield depends on many metabolic pathways enabling multiple processes, starting with photosynthetic carbon fixation and finishing with carbon conversion to end product. Because these processes involve multiple genes and pathways, traditional plant breeding or single transgene approaches are limited and provide only incremental gains in yield. Yield10 Bioscience will focus on identifying key combinations of genes to deliver step changes in crop yield. This will be achieved using the foundation “T3 Platform” technology developed at Metabolix that utilizes advanced transcriptome network analysis to identify key global regulatory genes, and the broad set of metabolic genes they control, with the potential to massively up-regulate key pathways. We have demonstrated the T3 Platform technology in switchgrass in gene discovery efforts focused on increasing photosynthesis and primary plant metabolism and have identified key global transcription factors that increase photosynthesis, biomass yield, and starch accumulation. This T3 Platform technology can be used to query gene data sets to discover methods to increase carbon flow to other metabolic pathways by changing the input information. In collaborations with leading academic groups, Metabolix has accessed additional novel traits each also targeting step changes in crop yield through metabolic engineering. The combination of in-house and licensed technologies combined with metabolic modeling, systems biology, and bioinformatics fully integrated through the T3 platform forms the technical foundation for the next generation of crop metabolic engineering to achieve step changes in yield.
The company was founded in 1992, is based in Cambridge Massachusetts
Yield10 Reports 2016 Camelina Field Test Results for C3003 Yield Trait Gene
Yield10 announced preliminary field test results in its model Camelina system showing that the novel yield trait gene C3003 produces significant improvements in seed yield. Specifically, C3003 produced an increase in seed yield in Camelina of up to 23% in the best line as measured by average seed weight (kg/hectare), which was statistically significant as compared to control plants. The field trials, which were started in May 2016, were primarily designed to establish Yield10’s Fast Field Testing platform and accelerate the generation of field data for crop trait discovery and improvement in addition to evaluating changes in seed yield and composition generated by specific trait leads in Camelina.
Read more about the Camelina results here.