Amatera speeds up plant breeding by screening cells in the lab
Start-up Amatera has built a platform that screens new plant varieties at the cell culture stage rather than on whole plants. It expects to save at least five times the cost and half the time.
Amatera, a plant breeding start-up, has developed a high-throughput automated platform that screens new plant varieties at the plant cell culture stage. The company was cofounded in 2022 by CEO Omar Dekkiche and CTO Lucie Kriegshauser. The approach targets a stage of breeding that currently takes considerable time and money. AgFunder, the parent company of AgFunderNews, is an investor in Amatera.
How the approach works
The standard process is to turn cells into plants first and then genotype them to see what has been produced. Amatera instead isolates cells from one another, grows them in the lab and identifies the cell lines of interest. Only those are regenerated into plants. The company's methods are patented and combine cell biology with automation and robotics, since single cells cannot be handled manually.
The company initially focused on perennial crops. It induces spontaneous genetic variation using physical and chemical methods, producing a large library of non-GMO cell lines that are sequenced and screened. The same screening can be applied to cell lines made by other methods, such as gene editing.
Savings and limits
Dekkiche says the company is gathering lab data on the savings, but expects at least five times lower cost and two times shorter timelines than conventional methods. Traits can be screened at the cell level where a genetic marker is known, such as caffeine production. For drought or yield resilience there is no clear cell-level screening yet, so the company does not promise it.
Crops and plans
Amatera works on coffee and grapes. In coffee it is developing caffeine-free varieties and Robustica, which is meant to taste like Arabica but be more resilient. It has identified new genes linked to quality that are being validated, and market arrival is still some way off. In grapes the aim is resistance to downy and powdery mildew, a major fungal problem in Europe. No partnerships with seed companies have been announced, but they are expected in the coming months. The company raised a seed round this year and in June secured a place on the European Union-backed EIC accelerator programme to build an end-to-end device that runs plant cell regeneration autonomously.
