Food security and climate change are two of the greatest challenges facing humanity. With shrinking farmland and a growing population, we need Smart Breeding technologies: technologies that accelerate the creation of crop varieties that increase yield, resist disease, and tolerate heat and drought. Today, many bottlenecks exist to make Smart Breeding affordable only to the largest breeders and staple crops.
Our solution is haplotagging, a new DNA sequencing method built around microbeads. It simplifies complex lab work into a single, easy-to-use reagent, and adds valuable “haplotype” context to the sequence. This extra information improves accuracy, uncovers more variation, and, when combined with advanced analytics, enables Smart Breeding across all crops, including wild varieties, while cutting both cost and development time.
Haplotagging can overcome the current bottlenecks, allowing breeders to grow more food on less land, manage climate risks, preserve genetic diversity, and expand crop options. By democratizing Smart Breeding, we help commercial breeders, both large and small, many of which are based in the Netherlands, to maintain leadership in high-tech farming. In this project, our first step is to partner with leading and mid-size growers to apply haplotagging in breeding, genome profiling, and new variety development, while building market insight and a strong business case for scaling this innovation.
