St. Louis, Missouri and Pasadena,
California
June 11, 2009
New collaboration could help
shorten project timelines for agricultural biotechnology
products
Monsanto Company (NYSE: MON) and Pasadena-based Protabit
LLC, today announced a two-year collaboration to develop new
tools for protein design and optimization.
All organisms produce a diverse set of proteins to express
characteristic attributes, which in plants can include tolerance
to drought and pests. Monsanto agricultural biotechnology
researchers use high-throughput protein design and optimization
technologies to rapidly design more effective proteins to confer
beneficial traits in crops.
Development of improved software tools for protein design and
optimization can help shorten the product discovery process.
This would enable Monsanto to more quickly identify pipeline
gene candidates in support of the company's sustainability goal
of doubling yields in its core crops of corn, cotton, and
soybeans by 2030, compared to a base year of 2000.
"We believe that utilizing state-of-the-art protein design
software, coupled with our high-throughput gene synthesis and
protein purification platforms, will further strengthen our R&D
pipeline and maintain Monsanto's leadership in the field of
biotech crops," said Steve Padgette, vice president of
biotechnology for Monsanto. "The partnership with Protabit will
help Monsanto stay on the leading edge of innovation and ensure
that farmers continue to have access to valuable traits as
quickly as possible, so that they can continue to boost on-farm
productivity. We are excited by the opportunity to work closely
with the Protabit team to accelerate our unique approach to
high-throughput protein design pioneered by our research teams
in Cambridge, Massachusetts and St. Louis."
Protabit is a start-up company founded by Stephen Mayo, PhD, of
the California Institute of Technology and Homme Hellinga, PhD,
of Duke University. Both are leaders in the field of
computational protein design and expect the software created by
Protabit to have broad applicability as a protein improvement
and discovery tool in biotechnology.
"Recent advances in protein sequence design coupled to robotic
expression of proteins will dramatically improve the efficacy of
computational protein design methodology," Mayo said. "We look
forward to collaborating with Monsanto on both the development
of new methodology and its application to protein design
projects that lead to new and/or improved products in the ag
biotech arena."
Under the agreement:
- Protabit will develop new
software code to integrate computational approaches for
protein optimization allowing for exchange of information
across platforms thus providing more flexibility and easier
assimilation of new breakthroughs, speeding up the process
of protein design and optimization.
- Protabit will also work on
developing new computational approaches for protein
optimization.
Monsanto will have exclusive
rights to tools developed by Protabit for use in the fields of
plant improvement and agriculture.
Monsanto Company is a leading global provider of
technology-based solutions and agricultural products that
improve farm productivity and food quality. Monsanto remains
focused on enabling both small-holder and large-scale farmers to
produce more from their land while conserving more of our
world's natural resources such as water and energy. To learn
more about our business and our commitments, please visit:
www.monsanto.com.
Protabit LLC is a recently formed company focused on integrating
existing computational protein design methods and developing the
next generation of protein design software. This next generation
of software will include recent advances in multi-state design,
protein library design, and the use of novel hardware such as
graphics processing units (GPUs) for ultra high-performance
computing. |
|
