Friedberg claims precision gene editing can achieve plant breeding outcomes 100 times faster than traditional seven to thirteen year cycles.
“What used to be, you know, a seven to thirteen year cycle, you can actually do a 100 times better than that by doing precision gene editing in a year.”
Friedberg says precision gene editing compresses plant breeding from seven to thirteen years down to one year, 100 times faster.
“So there's a massive transformation happening in plant breeding. What used to be, you know, a seven to thirteen year cycle, you can actually do a 100 times better than that by doing precision gene editing in a year, and in biologics, there's so many products that seem to have extraordinary potential at replacing traditional inputs, biopesticides, bio fertilizers,”
Friedberg uses Arc Institute's EVO2 model in production at Ohalo to score plant DNA before phenotyping.
“We feed the whole DNA sequence of every plant in, and that model will tell us, Hey, these genes are dysfunctional or may have issues.”
Friedberg explains Ohalo successfully applied boosted breeding across multiple plant species by converting single cells back into plants.
“We did it across multiple plant species. We were able to grow the plants back into plants because you're doing this to single cells at a time and you try and get those single cells to think that they're plants and grow back and then start to phenotype them or measure them.”