This Gates-backed startup can fine-tune plants for specific purposes—without ever touching their genes

In a test on fields in California last year, a plot of tomatoes looked exactly like the tomatoes growing next to it. But thanks to a tweak in how they were grown, they lasted longer: After they were harvested, they still looked and tasted fresh two weeks later.

The new crop wasn’t bred differently or genetically edited. Instead, the plants had been given an epigenetic treatment that fine-tunes certain traits without changing the plant’s DNA. That can happen either when the plant is a seed or by spraying a crop as it’s growing in the field. Decibel Bio, the startup behind the technology, is using the approach to help the food system deal with a range of growing challenges, including drought and extreme heat. The company emerged from stealth today, spinning out from another company called Sound Agriculture, with a $12 million financing round from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Future Ventures, Bayer, and Syngenta.

“Epigenetics is really a sort of frontier that hasn’t been tapped into yet in plant science,” says CEO and founder Travis Bayer (no relation to the family behind the agtech giant). “We’re at the forefront of that with our platform.”

The field of epigenetics studies how the environment changes the way genes are expressed—in humans, for example, if we exercise or eat differently, our genes start to work differently, though the underlying DNA is the same. In the case of the tomatoes, exposing the seeds to certain pieces of the plant’s own DNA resulted in “tuning down” enzymes that naturally degrade the fruit.

“What we’re really doing is working with what the plant has, but just making a little bit less of that enzyme that is responsible for the cell wall degradation,” Bayer says. The tomatoes lasted roughly twice as long as they otherwise would have. A similar approach for lettuce yielded greens that lasted three times as long without browning.

In another set of approximately 50 trials that will run this summer in the Midwest, the startup will test how other treatments can help make corn drought-tolerant, better resist disease, or enhance yields. In a place like Iowa, where severe droughts are becoming more common—but don’t happen predictably every year—the treatment for drought tolerance could help farmers adapt in real time. The state often has plenty of rain (or too much of it); switching completely to a drought-tolerant variety could mean lower yields in wet years. With Decibel’s platform, farmers could grow standard corn and then spray it with the new product. The shift in plant physiology happens in around a week.

“Our platform gives a grower the ability to kind of retune and rewire the plant physiology during the season,” Bayer says. “That’s something that hasn’t really been available to growers so far. If you plant a corn hybrid that doesn’t have drought tolerance and you have a drought, you don’t really have a way to deal with that.”

The company is starting in the U.S. but says there’s an even greater opportunity to implement its technology in parts of the world with less irrigation, where farmers are completely dependent on rainfall. “The idea is to smooth out the variability that growers see, so they can have a more predictable harvest, a more predictable income, more predictable food security in their region,” he says.

The basic platform can be used in multiple other ways. Some treatments could be applied to crops in advance of a major storm to help the plants survive floods. Another iteration could help keep plants growing under extreme heat. Treatments could also enhance photosynthesis—or help crops use less fertilizer. The company has also tested approaches to help crops like soy and peas grow with extra protein, something that can be useful for making plant-based meat. The team plans to continue developing new products, with a focus on major row crops like corn and wheat. A new type of treatment for a particular crop can be developed within a matter of months.

The approach could be employed commercially on farms as soon as next year, depending on pilot results and regulatory approval. (Though the method is new, it will likely be regulated as a “biostimulant” by the Environmental Protection Agency; since the DNA of the crops doesn’t change, it isn’t regulated as a genetically modified organism, or GMO.)

As climate change progresses, it could be a critical tool to help the food system. “If you talk to farmers today—or even 10 years ago—one thing that you hear over and over again is that the weather is more and more unpredictable every year,” Bayer says. “We know from climate models and a lot of data that we are seeing more extreme weather, and that impacts farmers directly on a day-to-day basis. Our big motivation here was, let’s try to give farmers some tools to adapt to this new reality.”

View the full article