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About Cibus
Founded in 2001, Cibus is a privately-held San Diego-based trait
development company that produces environmentally-friendly crop
traits for the agricultural community. Through the application
of a proprietary technology called the Rapid Trait Development
System (RTDS™), Cibus yields traits that are free of the
market-resistance and regulatory burden of attributes engineered
using the introduction of foreign genetic material. RTDS has
proven itself in the laboratory with several different crops as
well as in the initial field trials of Cibus’ first commercial
crop.
About Cibus’ RTDS technology
RTDS is an environmentally-safe, smart-breeding technology that
enables seed producers to develop plants with commercially
valuable characteristics. Unlike genetic engineering—which
produces GMO crops by inserting exotic genetic material from one
species into another—RTDS introduces genetic traits through a
natural process of gene repair within the very same plant
species. RTDS operates exclusively within the genome of the
plant, just like normal plant breeding, and thus eliminates
environmental and health risks as well as other unintended and
unknown consequences associated with GMO crops.
Cibus technology produces changes within a plant species that
could only occur in nature, but it does so in a focused way.
Thanks in part to recent advancements in genome mapping that
have illuminated many gene targets, RTDS is more precise and
much faster than traditional hit-and-miss plant breeding (with
or without marker assisted selection) and transgenic breeding
technology, both of which can take years to perfect a trait.
Cibus technology delivers the advantages that farmers seek in
GMO crops such as herbicide tolerance or increased yield and
benefits from the clear path to market and consumer confidence
of traditionally bred plants. Cibus’ regulatory advantage and
the speed of this plant breeding technology promise the greatly
accelerated development of new value added traits in readily
accepted crops.
The RTDS process, also known as directed mutagenesis, works
through the cell’s natural process of gene repair. Every time a
cell copies DNA, it makes “scrivener” errors or spelling
mistakes. These variations happen all the time, which is how
natural variation occurs. Cibus’ technology harnesses the cell’s
own natural DNA repair machinery to correct such spelling
mistakes, thus directing DNA repair enzymes to correct and
repair the targeted gene in a specific way in order to produce a
desired trait. The process, in its precision, is similar to
altering a letter in a single word contained within a large
book. Nothing in the genome is altered by this approach other
than the changes directed by the process. |
