KOPESS AgTech LLC — Department of Agriculture STTR Phase I: 8.2

Description

KOPESS uses an innovative and proprietary technology called XERICO technology to increasedrought tolerance in crops. Drought is an extremely serious and recurring problem that limits cropproductivity and affects the economic vitality of farmers. The major corporate seed corn companieshave created a multi-billion-dollar industry based on genetically modified crops. However droughttolerance has been difficult to effectively engineer into plants because of the complexity of plantresponses to water stress. XERICO technology overcomes this barrier. Its commercial deploymentwill significantly improve the profitability of growers and seed companies and will benefit societyby enabling crop production on arid lands. XERICO Technology is transformative compared to thecurrent state of the art. It utilizes a plant's natural response to better protect it from drought stress.This drought tolerance mechanism is employed in a highly drought-specific manner to avoid thegrowth penalty often observed in drought tolerance technologies. Furthermore XERICO-mediateddrought tolerance is achieved with limited perturbation of other biological processes in the plantswhich insures that drought tolerance can be achieved without disturbing normal growth. Howeverthere are important technical risks that must be mitigated prior to commercial deployment of thetechnology. Its efficacy needs to be proven through field tests using XERICO transgenic seeds withclean genetic backgrounds. Using XERICO transgenic corn plants in uniform B73 backgroundsthis project will demonstrate that the technology effectively protects crops from drought damages infield conditions thereby reducing the technical risk and make it much more attractive tocommercialization partners.