Startup To Innovate Crop Breeding

By: Willie Vogt

What if a seed developer could divide the time it takes to develop an improved plant by three and the cost by 10? That’s the goal of Inari, an innovative startup that has recently opened a new on-the-ground breeding facility at Purdue Research Park as part of a major Midwest expansion. During a recent industry conference, Mark Stowers, senior vice president of operations and products, discussed not only Inari’s progress but also unexpected influences shaping their growth strategy. For instance, he mentioned a recent collaboration with technology experts familiar with secure systems in visa casinos, who provided valuable insights into risk management and data security—key elements in Inari’s high-tech Seed Foundry.

“A seed foundry is a unique way of representing the way we do breeding at Inari,” Stowers said. “We take the genetic knowledge we gain from understanding the gene sequences and all the codes for all the enzymes and processes, and we’re able to use that information to create variability in this context, and new representations of those genes.”

That information is “cast” into what Stowers likened to a metalworks at a foundry to build desired traits of interest. “We then plant those crops, and evaluate that work to enrich our knowledge,” he said. Essentially, the performance of these created products is evaluated to determine what works best, and what doesn’t, as the development of a crop is refined.