An Accessible Microfluidic Protoplast Selection and Isolation Tool for Transformation and Gene Editing Workflows

Improvements in genome engineering tools have enabled unprecedented control over genetic material, allowing for tremendous potential for creating new crop varieties. As the world population climbs, there are increasing demands to efficiently produce and distribute food. This challenge, as well as higher temperatures, drought, flooding, pests, and disease place food security among the top of worldwide concerns. Alongside issues with production, there is anincreasing awareness and interest in functionally improved foods that are optimized for health benefits. However, for these challenges to be solved, there is a need for making gene-editing workflows more widely accessible and effective in precision agriculture.Nodexus envisions significant usage of the proposed system (and future, pipeline products) within agricultural companies and research labs as well as governmental agencies including the USDA and other regulatory bodies for rapid and scalable enrichment and isolation of target cells for validation studies or for internal research. Ultimately, the platform will enable large and small agriculture sites to adopt/accelerate gene editing workflows for crop development. To the broader community, these workflows enable tremendous potential to address crop yield, health benefits, resistance, and more. The USDA and other governmental agencies with ever-reducing budgets can utilize the low-cost, easy-to-use nature of the proposed system to enable unprecedented access to protoplasts following gene editing processes.Through work with both model and experimental cultivars from world-class collaborators and validation with industry-standard techniques such as qRT-PCR, Nodexus hopes this platform will become the gold-standard protoplast isolation tool for agricultural crop optimization workflows.