Wild Bioscience: transforming agriculture through innovation
7th May 2024
When a lengthy drought hit the UK in 2022, even maize - typically resilient to parched conditions - yielded to the scorching heat. This event underscored once again how vulnerable agricultural systems are to climate change and emphasised the urgent need for innovation solutions to ensure long-term food production. Flooding, another extreme weather event linked to climate change, poses additional challenges to crop production.
Addressing this head on is Wild Bioscience, a biotech spinout from the University of Oxford, which launched in 2021 with £12m of seed capital. Its mission is to tackle the challenges of global food security and climate change by pioneering a revolutionary approach to crop improvement, aiming to make crops such as wheat and maize grow faster and more productive by integrating expertise in plant biology with computer algorithms to analyse crop genetics.
Once they pinpoint specific genes associated with traits such as accelerated growth or heightened resistance to drought, they “activate” these genes in the crop to increase performance. Experiments conducted to boost photosynthetic efficiency have so far resulted in >20 per cent improvements in growth and seed production.
“Seeds are one of the most scalable technologies in history” said Ross Hendron, who is CEO at Wild Bioscience, and cofounded the company alongside Steve Kelly, Professor of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford.
“Seeds are more than just the beginning of a plant’s life; they are the starting point for dramatically improving entire agricultural systems,” said Ross. “When we optimise seeds, we’re not just enhancing individual plants; we’re revolutionising the tools that farmers have to meet the challenges of a changing climate.
“We’re facing two planetary scale challenges – how are we going to produce more crops to feed an increasingly hungry planet, and how are we going to decarbonise our atmosphere?”
By improving crop yields, Wild Bioscience hope their technology will not just result in higher productivity potential but avoid the need for further deforestation or conversion of natural habitats.
During his time as a researcher in Steve’s academic group at the University of Oxford, Ross started to envision an innovative approach to seed design. With the support of the team at Oxford University Innovation, Ross and Steve successfully translated their academic research into a tangible real-world solution.
“My interactions with entrepreneurs within the Oxford ecosystem during my PhD started me on this journey. It’s incredibly inspiring to be surrounded by world-leading experts who are rolling up their sleeves to create impact with their research.
“Since the earliest crops appeared, people have been mixing different varieties to find better combinations. But now we’re facing the challenge that we’ve used up a lot of the genetic variation, which limits our ability to breed our way out of climate change.
“What makes Wild Bioscience different is we are tackling this genetic bottleneck from an evolutionary biology angle. In nature, wild plants have been adapting to different environments over hundreds of millions of years and across radical shifts in historic climates. That’s a dramatically bigger genetic search space to explore than is possible with current crop improvement methods. We created machine learning workflows that understand evolution to help us identify the best traits in wild plants that deal with environmental stress. Then we translate these abilities into crops by making a small tweak to the generic makeup of crops.”
Wild Bioscience, which currently employs 25 staff, raised seed capital from Oxford Science Enterprises and Braavos Capital when it launched in 2021, and supplemented this with a grant from Innovate UK. It has just started its fourth set of field trials with more planned later this year.
“We’re focusing on widely grown row crops where we have the biggest potential for making agriculture more sustainable. But our method isn’t limited to specific crops – it’s flexible and can benefit a wide range of crops.
“We believe our evolutionary AI platform will revolutionise crop design. Already we are seeing significant improvements in crop performance from the initial traits tested in world-wide field trials.
“This marks a major milestone for us as we evaluate how well our designs perform in challenging, real-life conditions across different crops and environments.”
Discover more about Wild Bioscience’s approach to crop improvement by visiting their website.
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