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Evogene Ltd., a publicly quoted plant biotechnology company (TASE: EVGN) and CIRAD, a French scientific organization, announce the expansion of their multi-year collaboration signed in 2004. The goal of the new project is to introduce Evogene’s candidate gene, EVO133, into cotton and to validate it’s improvement for drought tolerance.

Cotton is the third largest genetically modified crop by its importance, after soybean and corn, and provides 40% of the global fiber requirements. Cotton is grown on about 35 million hectares worldwide, 10 million hectares (28%) of which are grown with GM varieties. Cotton is largely grown in marginal agricultural areas where precipitations are low and drought resistance is often the first limiting factor for yield. Drought resistance is one of the key factors which can help dry areas stay competitive in the global cotton market.

EVO133 is Evogene's candidate gene for yield, and yield stability under drought, heat and salinity conditions. EVO133 has been tested in three seasons of field trials in processing tomato varieties and has demonstrated its potential to increase yield under normal conditions, reduce yield penalty under drought conditions as well as under salinity and heat stresses. The validation of EVO133 is also advancing in other target crops under other collaborations, which have been announced publicly, namely in Corn with Biogemma and Soybean with Mertec.

Ofer Haviv, Evogene President and CEO stated: "Having identified EVO133 as a candidate for yield and yield stability, we are excited to advance towards obtaining promising results in the cotton crop. CIRAD's decades of experience in developing cotton varieties around the globe, makes it a very attractive partner for this project".

Bernard Hau, Head of the CIRAD Cotton Research Unit stated: “The search for rustic varieties resisting to drought corresponds to the demand of the developing countries and its importance will increase with climate change. CIRAD is pleased to have established a partnership with the Israeli company EVOGENE, a partner offering new tools to efficiently address this theme. Part of this project is financed by the EUREKA initiative through the French National Agency for Research (ANR).”

CIRAD, the “Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement”, is the French Agricultural Research Centre for international Development. Its mission is to contribute to the economic development of the tropical and subtropical regions through research on agriculture, training, and dissemination of its results. It employs 1,850 people, including 950 senior staff, working in French overseas departments and some fifty other countries. Its budget amounts to approximately 180 million Euros. CIRAD has three research departments: The Biological Systems Department, the Performance of Tropical Production and Processing Systems Department and the Environments and Societies Department. CIRAD operates through its own research centres, collaborating with national agricultural research systems, universities and international centres, as well as development projects.
CIRAD runs a Cotton Research Unit with a staff of 40 including 30 researchers and 10 technicians, in Africa, the Americas, South East Asia and Montpellier, France.

Evogene’s mission is to be a world leader in delivering improved plant traits to the agro-biotechnology and Biofuel industries through the use of a continuously improving proprietary platform that combines state-of-the-art computational genomics, molecular biology and advanced breeding methods. Evogene’s current product development portfolio includes such traits as: abiotic stress tolerance and yield, enhancement of cotton fiber quality, improving nitrogen use efficiency, increasing oil yield for the BioDiesel industry and plant manufacturing of therapeutic proteins. Evogene was created in 2002 as a spin-off of the agro-biotechnology division of Compugen Ltd. (Nasdaq: CGEN). Evogene’s core in-silico technology, the ATHLETE, is based on Compugen’s proprietary LEADS computational platform. Evogene completed an IPO on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in June 2007.

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