Ohmic Biosciences: Genetically engineering plants for disease resistance.
Summary
TL;DR: Ohmic Biosciences genetically engineers plants to make them resistant to disease. Many are being taken off the market and it is increasingly difficult to get new products approved.Genetic resistance traits are a better solution - no spraying - but are plagued by a basic tradeoff: they usually either work really well but are easy for pathogens to evolve around, or are robust to pathogen evolution but dont work so well.This comes down to a basic limitation of plant breeding and biotechnology as practiced today: both amount to hoping the gene you want already exists in nature and embarking on a fishing expedition to find it. Sometimes that works, but theres no reason to believe that genes useful for industrial agriculture will have evolved naturally.Ohmic Biosciences is taking a different approach. We engineer proteins that inhibit those effectors, effectively defanging plant diseases.Were starting by focusing on soybean cyst nematode (SCN), a tiny parasitic worm that has completely infested the US and causes >$1.5B in yield loss every year. That number is probably an underestimate, because SCN is an insidious root parasite that rarely causes visible above-ground symptoms - just yield loss.We met as postdocs at the University of Colorado Boulder where we worked together for 2.5 years on engineering plant hormone receptors into biosensors.