PacBio enters agricultural industry collaboration with Corteva Agriscience to develop high-throughput plant, pest and microbial sequencing

PacBio (NASDAQ: PACB), a leading provider of high-quality, highly accurate sequencing platforms, announced a new collaboration with global agriculture company, Corteva Agriscience, to develop custom, end-to-end workflows for plant, pest and microbial sequencing. The project focuses on establishing high-throughput workflows in DNA extraction and library preparation in alignment with the tens of thousands of samples sequenced annually as part of Corteva’s seed and crop protection research and production pipelines.

“This collaboration will allow us to help Corteva Agriscience characterize complex plant and microbial genomes more efficiently,” said Christian Henry, President and Chief Executive Officer of PacBio. “We are proud to provide a sequencing platform to Corteva Agriscience for use in its development of products that help farmers modernize agriculture while driving productivity gains for farmers and resiliency to help solve the problem of feeding the world.”

As the world’s population expands and a greater burden is put on food production, new methods are needed to keep pace with agricultural demand. Scientists are turning to modern genomics technology to sustainably meet this challenge. Biological insights gleaned from high-quality genomic data are used to characterize genes of interest, enhance marker development, and combat pests and diseases at the molecular level.

“We see great potential in digital technologies, new seed product development tools like CRISPR-Cas gene editing, and the next generation of crop protection solutions,” said Greg May, Genomics Technologies Lead at Corteva Agriscience. “Genome sequencing technology, especially when it has both long read lengths and high accuracy, is a key tool to unlocking the potential in these development areas. Using this technology at scale can help speed up the research and product development process. Corteva Agriscience’s expertise in ultra-high throughput sample processing positions the company well to quickly and effectively implement these novel genomic workflows.”

The initial phase of the collaboration, aimed for completion in the third quarter of 2022, will be developing the scaled DNA extraction and library preparation workflows to take advantage of the extensive collection of Corteva crop, pest and microbial samples. Upon success in the development of these workflows, the collaboration will look to expand sequencing capabilities alongside the sample preparation workflows.

“Working together with the industry-leading R&D organization at Corteva Agriscience to address the unique challenges of plant and microbial DNA extraction and library preparation is the most efficient route to implementing high-quality, long read genomics at scale,” commented Jonas Korlach, Chief Scientific Officer at PacBio.

To learn more about the benefits of HiFi sequencing in agrigenomics, visit www.pacb.com/agrigenomics.