Plantik Biosciences and Hudson River Biotechnology have struck a partnership to develop heat tolerance in strawberries, with the stated goal of producing a validated heat-tolerance trait that any strawberry breeder can license. Validation trials are already underway.

The deal combines heat-tolerant gene targets that France-based Plantik identified and validated in tomatoes with Hudson River's "transgene-free" strawberry genome editing methods. Plantik pinpoints which parts of the genome to edit; Hudson River makes the edits in the plants. Hudson River's BioMaas platform will act, in the companies' words, "as a bridge" between trait developers and breeders.

The economics of the arrangement target smaller breeding programs. Hudson River CEO Fernando Los argues that the technical, regulatory and financial demands of trait discovery and gene editing put the process out of reach for breeders outside the largest seed companies — and strawberry breeders face the steepest barriers.

"What we offer here is essentially de-risking and very cheap access to a piece of technology that's normally only available to the very largest companies," says Los. "If you reduce the failure rate from 90% to maybe 10% for a breeder, that's a very good proposition to offer them."

Speed as the selling point

Plantik's ATLANTIS machine learning platform searches what the company calls "the dark genome" — the regulatory stretches of plant DNA that switch genes on and off. Because the edits insert no foreign DNA, breeders can fast-track crop development. Plantik claims its first product, a heat-tolerant tomato, took roughly 12 months to develop instead of the five to eight years traditional breeding requires. The company is currently running demonstrations in greenhouses and fields in the US and Belgium.

"We have now worked on this trait in multiple tomato crops, from lab tomatoes to now commercial hybrids," says Plantik cofounder and CEO Ying Shao. "Overall, we see that in the real conditions, the material also performs much better in terms of yield preservation under high heat."

Hudson River says its BioMaas platform lets breeders access genome editing without building R&D in-house, and Los claims the company can now make complex edits in tomatoes and strawberries "in a matter of months."

Why strawberries, and why now

Heat tolerance has become a commercial imperative as extreme heat events multiply. Shao calls it "a must-have trait for many crops across the globe." Strawberries rank among the most exposed: high temperatures disrupt flowering and fruit set and degrade fruit quality.

The fruit also presents a harder editing problem than tomato. "Strawberry is a different story from tomato because it's genetically much more complex," says Los. "It's an octoploid species rather than a diploid. Propagation is normally done clonally, so you cannot create seeds; you have to work directly in relevant commercial germplasm, which are all things that we can do."

Regulatory momentum is amplifying commercial interest. Los says changes to EU rules that simplify CRISPR regulations have caused "a surge of interest" in the business.

Strawberry is the starting point, not the endpoint. The companies plan to extend the approach to other crops and are inviting other firms to bring trait challenges for their own strawberry varieties. For an industry watching heat events shave yields and quality across fruiting crops, the open-licensing model — trait discovery in exchange for a breeder network — could set a template for how mid-sized genetics firms compete with the majors.