Baltimore, Maryland, USA
August 22, 2011

Plant Sensory Systems, LLC, an agricultural biotech company located at the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park, today announced that it has received a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase IIB award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The award extends the development of their Nitrogen Use Efficiency and Stress Tolerance (NUEST) technology that has been demonstrated in monocots such as corn.

The focus of the project is to develop “drop-in” cassettes for the NUEST technology in dicot crops.

A drop-in cassette is a construct consisting of a promoter, gene, and terminator that could be licensed for use in a specific crop.

“We have developed rapid systems that allow us to optimize the performance of a technology in dicot crops,” stated Kathleen Turano, president at Plant Sensory Systems.

“The development of drop-in cassettes will decrease the time and cost of transferring new traits into the elite lines of our partners and allow the technology to get into the marketplace more quickly.”

Website: http://www.plantsensorysystems.com

Published: August 22, 2011