- Background
- What we're looking for
- What we can offer you
- Who we are
- Q&A
The global agricultural landscape faces continuous challenges, including climate unpredictability, increasing pest and disease pressures, and labor shortage. These challenges threaten yield stability, quality, and operational efficiency, especially in specialty crops like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, melons, and strawberries. To ensure food security and promote sustainability, agricultural practices must evolve toward resilient, resource-efficient production. One promising approach is the application of gene editing technologies to improve the health and resilience of fruits and vegetables.
We aim to leverage gene editing to develop solanaceous crops (such as tomatoes and peppers), cucurbits (such as cucumbers and melons), and strawberries that exhibit reduced susceptibility to diseases, enhanced structural traits, and improved agronomic sustainability, including tolerance to variable growing conditions. The ideal outcomes include:
- Disease Resistance: To develop fruits and vegetables with enhanced resistance to prevalent diseases, and minimizing crop losses.
- Architectural Modifications: to create plants with structural changes that allow for more efficient production practices, facilitate mechanized harvesting, optimize space utilization across operations and faster growth cycles, without compromising yield.
- Improved agronomic sustainability: to ensure stability and tolerance to changes across different growing environments, efficient resource use, and reduced need for inputs
- Gene-edited traits in the specific horticultural crops listed above
- Mature technology demonstrated in the listed crops
- Shows clear, measurable phenotypes tested under greenhouse or field conditions
- Ready for licensing or commercial development via trait integration
- Gene edits completed and molecularly characterized in the crops or interest
- Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as defined by regulatory standards
- Proof-of-concept technology
Bayer’s vision of #HealthForAll, #HungerForNone drives our need to strengthen innovation capabilities in all areas of agriculture. We know we can’t accomplish this alone, so we're always interested to hear about novel, early-stage scientific innovations that can contribute to feeding the world without starving the planet. You have our commitment to take a look, match with our R&D priorities and provide you timely feedback.
Learn more
The Q&A is now closed.
Other recommended requests
delivered to your inbox.