Founded in 1989 in Wageningen, an important city of life and food science in the Netherlands, KeyGene is now positioned as an agricultural biotechnology company dedicated to plant innovation, specializing in improving crop traits through new breeding techniques. KeyGene's core technology development runs through all aspects of plant breeding, and has developed six crop innovation technology platforms for gene analysis, feature discovery, digital phenotype, precision breeding, cell and tissue design, and genomic breeding, each of which supports the individual needs of partners in plant breeding and research.
Among KeyGene's plant innovations, precision breeding that induces mutations in functionally validated genes through genome editing and other means is one of KeyGene's focuses. To date, KeyGene has developed product pipelines in plants such as potato crops, cereal crops, medicinal crops and horticultural crops. Among the representative are the multi-purpose crop study focused on chicory as dietary fiber and medicinal terpenes, launched in February 2018, and the study of peppers with disease-resistant traits in 2019.
Chicory without bitterness
Chicory plants are rich in dietary fiber and compounds with potential medicinal value, and the rhizome part of chicory is a source of natural sweetener inulin, which can be used as a raw material for foods such as bread and dairy products, which contain dietary fiber helps maintain healthy intestinal function. But usually, the production of inulin usually has to separate the bitter compounds in the rhizome through an additional processing process. With new breeding technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9, by turning off the four genes that cause bitter substances, KeyGene has produced a chicory variety that does not directly contain bitter compounds, which will make the processing process more streamlined, cheaper, and thus more sustainable, and can be more widely used in inulin production possible. The improved chicory variety was developed by KeyGene in collaboration with researchers at the Wageningen University Research Institute and is currently in the later stages of development.
In addition, KeyGene is also committed to the development of terpenes, a bitter compound with potential medicinal value in chicory, which is understood to not only protect plants from fungi and bacteria, but also be extracted as an anti-inflammatory agent or anticancer, with a wide range of uses.
Antiviral chili peppers
Source: KeyGene Business Plan
A feature of known resistant plants is their ability to protect themselves from viruses by recognizing them. However, the genetic material of viruses can easily change, which may mean that as plants continue to iterate, resistant plants may lose their resistance to viruses. Traditional approaches to this problem include, for example, breeding with wildly related species of crops to introduce new resistance, but this breeding method takes a very long time.
KeyGene uses single bases to improve the dual virus resistance of mutant crops, providing a more sustainable solution for growing binary virus-sensitive crops. By partnering with four leading vegetable breeding companies, Rijk Zwaan, Enza, Limagrain Vegetable Seeds and Takii, KeyGene's R&D team chose a breeding strategy that was very similar to resistance but completely different: growing crops that were not susceptible to viruses. These insensitive plants do not need to protect themselves: because the plants no longer produce the specific proteins needed for viral infection, the virus cannot approach them.
It is understood that there are very few plant varieties that are resistant to the binary virus, and KeyGene is the first research and development team to successfully breed a bell pepper plant that is insensitive to the binary virus. They did this by studying the genetic changes required for bell pepper plant virus infection. This led them to discover that crops were no longer susceptible to the binary virus due to small changes in the DTP gene.
In addition to the innovation of plant traits around gene editing technology, it can also be seen that KeyGene is leading in the development and innovation of more underlying technologies such as genome sequencing and assembly, phenotypic analysis technology, such as in its Genome Insights platform, KeyGene has developed the best polymer plant DNA isolation protocol, deployed powerful DNA long reading long sequencing technology to achieve sequence-based high-throughput breeding; Trait The Discovery platform enables development teams to identify and functionally verify genes and markers responsible for trait and phenotype expression in less time; its Digital Phenotype platform develops and applies artificial intelligence and other algorithms to obtain optimal phenotypic descriptions based on high-throughput imaging and image analysis.
In addition, it is worth noting that KeyGene, as a company based on an innovative technology platform, mainly realizes commercialization through core technology IP licensing and contract research and development OfContract Research Organization (CRO), of which core technology IP licensing is the most important source of income for KeyGene, so it attaches great importance to the development and protection of intellectual property rights. KenGene has been granted 10-15 patents per year since 2005 and 80 patents in 2015 alone.
To date, KeyGene has applied for more than 500 patents for 70 inventions. Top tier patents are at the heart of building and sustaining the company's business model. As a result, almost all of the company's products (technology, methods, materials of character) are re-licensed after protection has been applied for, mainly from Europe, the United States, China and Japan. For example, its genotyping technology, Sequence-Based Genotyping (SBG), has a wide range of applications in both medical and agricultural research and diagnostics, ranging from the evaluation of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers associated with valuable traits in plants and animals to the detection of specific mutations associated with human diseases, which are currently not only licensed to seed giants such as Bayer and Limagrain. It is also being adopted by companies such as LGC to provide technical services. In addition, it should be mentioned that in terms of authorization options, KeyGene will be more careful about countries with lax IP protection.
Overall, based on six crop innovation platforms based on technologies such as multi-scale genome sequencing and assembly technology, ultra-high molecular weight DNA isolation technology, and sequence-based genotyping technology, innovations that support plant breeding research are an important pillar of KeyGene. At present, the company is more based on its unique advanced technology IP licensing as the core, at present, KeyGene has provided access to its unique technology and feature components to more than 30 institutional entities around the world, including agricultural enterprises, licensed service providers and academic research institutions, through licensing. In the future, KeyGene is expected to continue to leverage its unique technological competitive advantage and deepen its commercialization model of technology IP licensing and contract research and development.