About the innovator

The FutureAgriculture consortium integrates diverse skills in computational biology, enzyme directed evolution, biochemistry, microbiology, plant genomics and plant physiology. The team, composed of 4 research groups coming from renewed research institutes (Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, and Imperial College London) and 2 SME (IN srl and Evogene), collects the essential skills to cover the whole project: the design of the optimized pathways, their test in several platforms and, finally, their implementation in plants.

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What is the innovation

FutureAgriculture aims to boost agricultural productivity by designing and engineering plants that directly overcome the deficits of natural photorespiration and support higher photosynthetic rate and yield. The resulting synthetic plants should carry out a more efficient metabolism that bypasses photorespiration without releasing CO2.
Rather than reshuffling and grafting existing enzymes in line with current metabolic-engineering thinking, FutureAgriculture’s approach demands the de novo engineering of new enzymes in order to catalyze metabolic transformations that are still unknown in nature. Given the combinatorial nature of metabolic pathways, the addition of one novel reaction dramatically expands the resulting possible pathways. FutureAgriculture takes this strategy to a new level by constructing de novo pathways within the very core of carbon metabolism. Computational power and chemical logic have helped the identification of the most promising synthetic pathways – i.e., short pathways with low consumption of cellular resources. Once recruited all the necessary enzymes, existing or engineered, the selected routes are first tested in vitro, then in engineered bacteria that support the evolution of the pathway activity, and later in a simple photosynthetic organism, the cyanobacteria.
Only the most promising pathways are implemented in higher plants to finally monitor their effects on plant growth and physiology. Plant growth rate and biomass yield are expected to increase under various environmental conditions, thus, paving the way for enhanced agricultural productivity of crops like rice, wheat, barley, oat, soybean, cotton, and potato.
The 5-years FutureAgriculture project started in January 2016. During the last three years, the Consortium has completed the in silico and in vitro phases of the project and is now moving towards the in vivo phase: the implementation of the best pathways in photosynthetic living organisms, namely cyanobacteria and plants.

Out of the lab. Into the market

Foreseen exploitation strategies are twofold: on one side our partner Evogene is one of the leading company in the markets of FutureAgriculture. This guarantees a direct exploitation strategy of the project results. On the other hand, as suggested by a patent analysis, there is some space for other exploitations based on results that will be effective in other markets.
In fact, the in vivo carbon fixation with improved photorespiration pathway can be the basis of a spin-off, focusing on plants; cyanobacteria; non-photosynthetic, autotrophic bacteria.
To develop our exploitation strategies, we identified three possible outcome scenarios: a royalty-based company as business model with the exclusion of consultancy-based (Science2Business); a company selling strain as a product, e.g., “photorespiration pathway in cyanobacteria strain” to other companies for further engineering (Science2Business); and a company selling directly the final product, e.g., plant seed, (Science2Consumers).

Benefits of participation in Horizon 2020

Feeding 10-15 billion people in the year 2100 is a tremendously challenging task that will only be met by the implementation of drastic measures to increase agricultural productivity. FutureAgriculture offers not a simple improvement but a giant leap in agricultural productivity. Its solution can be achieved within a reasonable timeframe and it relies on genetic and metabolic engineering and not on morphological or structural modifications. However, such a high risk - high gain research needed the right support.
From the moment it was conceived, FutureAgriculture fitted extremely well within the FET programme, having a strong technological side and a visionary approach far beyond the state-of-the-art. FutureAgriculture breakthrough technology is not incremental but truly revolutionary, changing the today paradigms. Its success is ensured by the multidisciplinary Consortium, a fertile environment in which different expertise come together and complement each other. Only thanks to the H2020 support, the whole Consortium has been able to pursue the challenging goal of FutureAgriculture.

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