Yield10 Bioscience achieves key milestones in early development program in corn to evaluate novel traits

Yield10 Bioscience, Inc. (Nasdaq:YTEN), an agricultural bioscience company, announced on Tuesday that it achieved key milestones in an early development program in corn to evaluate novel seed yield traits. Corn is the highest value commercial crop grown in the United States.

The Company’s corn program began in early 2019, centered around the successful deployment of novel traits discovered by Yield10 into corn by a major third-party agriculture company partner. With this phase of the program complete, Yield10 recently contracted an additional third-party agriculture company to create homozygous and hybrid corn lines, bulk-up seed, and conduct field testing of the novel traits in corn to evaluate the impact on seed yield.

“Yield10’s corn development program continues to progress on schedule, benefiting from access to critical industry expertise and resources that will be crucial to the evaluation of our novel traits in this high value crop,” said Kristi Snell, Ph.D., Chief Science Officer of Yield10 Bioscience. “The utilization of another third-party agriculture company for creating and field testing hybrid lines will provide our scientific team with field data on our traits deployed in elite corn lines.”

“The completed deployment of our traits in corn and the start of the next phase of development which will include field tests, are key milestones for Yield10 as it firmly places us further along the path toward licensing and commercialization of our novel yield traits in this important crop,” said Oliver Peoples, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Yield10 Bioscience. “Further, we continue to establish working relationships with major agricultural companies whose feedback and expertise provide us greater context and insight into how to commercialize this program. We believe success in our corn program would further demonstrate the versatility of our GRAIN platform, positioning us for commercial partnerships and licensing opportunities.”

The yield traits in the corn development program include C3003, C3004, and C3011, as well as the transcription factors C4001, C4002, and C4003.

Corn is planted on approximately 90 million acres and is the highest value crop in the United States for seed company revenue. Harvests from recent years have reached approximately 15 billion bushels, worth approximately $50 billion. Improving seed yield in corn would increase revenue for growers and contribute to global food security.