SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, US — Cibus, Inc. said it has successfully regenerated plants from single cells in a wheat cultivar, a breakthrough the agricultural technology company intends to use to develop a family of traits to address the most pressing challenges faced by wheat farmers globally, focusing initially on disease resistance and nitrogen use efficiency.

Cibus, based in San Diego, California, US, said its breakthrough is believed to represent the world’s first successful regeneration of a wheat plant from single cells. It provides another single-cell regeneration system to make its proprietary high-throughput breeding process, called the Trait Machine, operational for a key cereal crop integral to food security globally.

“In this tour de force, I am proud of our team’s persistence, the result of which is the opening of a scalable gene editing process in wheat, which is a major global crop and an important food staple,” said Greg Gocal, executive vice president and chief scientific officer of Cibus.

Development of disease resistance traits in wheat offers the promise of protecting yield potential while reducing fungicide use, Cibus said, and the company is encouraged that it will be able to address the major diseases in wheat with this breakthrough. A nitrogen-use efficiency trait would have the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of the crop, which requires large acres to cultivate, while offering better yield with similar fertilization, according to Cibus.

This platform also enables the development of improved wheat quality traits, potentially reducing or eliminating allergens such as gluten and even further improvement of the company’s high-fiber wheat, the company noted.

Cibus uses gene editing to develop and license traits to seed companies, focusing on productivity traits for major global crops such as canola, rice, soybean and wheat. The Trait Machine process is a crop-specific application of Cibus’ patented Rapid Trait Development System (RTDS). The proprietary technologies in RTDS integrate crop specific cell biology platforms with a series of gene editing technologies to enable a system of end-to-end crop specific precision breeding.