Kicking off the 2024 row crop planting season!

Over the past few months, we’ve planted inbred corn, hybrid corn, and soybean plots in 9 states to evaluate Genetic Expression Traits across varying growing conditions. This year, we're focusing on developing value-added agronomic traits like improving stand establishment, nutrient use efficiency, compositional gains, and yield, as well as trait heritability across generations in partnership with our seed company collaborators.

This season, we have partnered with several seed companies to activate Genetic Expression Traits in their cultivars. BioLumic has developed a new way to identify and developing crop traits, outpacing traditional breeding, GMO and genetic editing methods with 10x the speed to market and 100x lower cost. It does so by activating untapped, natural pathways in plants through UV Light Signals, not the underlying genetics, bypassing regulatory challenges of chemical innovation and GMOs.  Our focus is now on exploiting our proprietary knowledge of mode-of-action to lock traits into breeding lines, and help farmers maximize the genetic potential of every seed they plant.  

Light treatments are easy to apply. They are short duration, taking only seconds to administer at the seed production stage, and the treatment effects are stored in the seed until planting. Genetic Expression Traits are stackable and work synergistically with traditional chemical or biological seed applied treatments and GM/gene editing techniques. 

Our 2024 field development work builds off multiple years of field trialing demonstrating double digit yield, stand establishment, and crop quality improvements with 3,000+ field trial plots executed in the US to date. Visit our Row Crop webpage to see the highlights from our 2023 season and to learn more about our partnership program for seed companies.