Monsanto Company has teamed up with Protabit LLC, a California-based company, to develop new tools for protein design and optimisation. This collaboration could help shorten project timelines for agricultural biotechnology products. It will speed up delivery of valuable traits to farmers and help boost on-farm productivity.
Under the two-year agreement, Protabit will develop new software code to integrate computational approaches for protein optimisation, allowing exchange of information across platforms, thus providing more flexibility and easier assimilation of new breakthroughs, speeding up the process of protein design and optimisation.
?All organisms produce a diverse set of proteins to express characteristic attributes, which in plants can include tolerance to drought and pests. Monsanto agricultural biotechnology researchers use high-throughput protein design and optimisation technologies to design more effective proteins to confer beneficial traits in crops. Improved software tools for protein design and optimisation can help shorten the product discovery process,? a Monsanto statement said.
It is expected to enable the company to identify more quickly pipeline gene candidates in its efforts to doubling yields of its core crops of corn, cotton, and soybeans by 2030, compared to a base year of 2000.
According to Steve Padgette, vice president of biotechnology for Monsanto, by utilising state-of-the-art protein design software, together with its high-throughput gene synthesis and protein purification platforms, Monsanto would be able to strengthen further its R&D pipeline and maintain leadership in the field of biotech crops, and stay on the leading edge of innovation.
Protabit is a start-up company founded by Stephen Mayo of the California Institute of Technology and Homme Hellinga of Duke University. Both are leaders in the field of computational protein design and expect the software created by Protabit to have broad applicability as a protein improvement and discovery tool in biotechnology.