HOLLAND, Man. – An American trait development company is making progress on a glyphosate tolerant flax variety, says James Radtke, product development vice-president for Cibus Global.
Radtke told producers attending the Manitoba Flax Growers Association’s annual general meeting in Holland March 3 that his company should be growing flax plants with herbicide tolerance by 2012.
However, it will still be several years before it can commercialize the technology.
Cibus Global announced a partnership with the Flax Council of Canada last April to develop the variety, which isn’t genetically modified.
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The San Diego based company, which employs 50 people, including 40 scientists, uses a patented Rapid Trait Development System (RTDS) to create lines of plants with desired traits. It is also developing herbicide tolerant canola and rice, as well as traits for other crops.
It hasn’t commercialized any of its technology.
“We have canola that will be in registration trials, so we’re closest in canola,” Radtke said.
He said investors aren’t losing patience, despite the fact that Cibus was founded a decade ago and commercialization remains a few years off.
“We have very dedicated investors,” he said. “Basically a number of very wealthy people out of New York City.”
The company is also aided by its unique structure, under which it agrees to share royalties with collaborators such as the flax council.
“Our model is a bit unusual…. The collaborators fund the project and at the end we share royalties…. They would geta cut of the trait royalties that come back into the program.”
He said Cibus scientists create desirable plant traits without introducing foreign genetic material in a process similar to spell checking on a word processing program.
They make a synthetic fragment of DNA and insert it into a target location on the plant’s genetic code.
“It (the synthetic gene) has to match up, base pair by base pair, with everything in that gene except for the one change that we want to make,” he said.
The technology creates a mismatch in the DNA. Enzymes within cells recognize that something is wrong and take action to correct it.
“They say, aha, this has to be changed. And they make the change.”
The resulting gene has a different trait.
E[[ric Fridfinnson, president of the Manitoba Flax Growers Association, said he’s encouraged by the project’s progress, but David Rourke, a producer from Minto, Man., asked why Cibus and the flax council are focusing on glyphosate tolerance.
With more weeds developing glyphosate resistance, why invest time and money on a herbicide that may soon be ineffective?
Radtke said once Cibus develops its technology for glyphosate, it can look at stacking non-genetically modified traits for other herbicides onto its glyphosate technology.
