Collection and preservation technology to enable on-demand pollination in commercial hybrid wheat systems

Summary:Food productivity of the world's agriculture systems is highly dependent on the production ofhybrid crops. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has recommended thatmajor wheat yield improvements must play a key role to ensure future global food security.Experts agree the most promising way to improve wheat yields is to capture the higher productivityand vigor associated with hybridity.Despite 60+ years of effort by the seed industry to develophybrid wheat as a commercial product all the U.S. wheat acreage is still planted to self-pollinatedvarieties. Failure to ensure timely and intended cross-pollinations renders production of hybrid® wheat seed extremely inefficient and cost prohibitive. Our PowerPollen technology to preserve® and apply viable pollen on-demand is changing this paradigm.Developing a PowerPollen systemfor wheat presents significant technical challenges due to the short life of pollen and feasibility ofcollecting sufficient pollen for on-demand pollinations. We are seeking to overcome theselimitations by developing novel technologies to extract large volumes of highly viable pollendirectly from anthers collected from excised wheat spikes. The goal of this Phase I SBIR projectis to prove the feasibility of developing a scalable technology for collecting large volumes of viablewheat pollen.This engineering achievement is essential to enable on-demand pollination andrevolutionize hybrid wheat seed production.The research objectives are: (1) Prove the feasibilityof designing/constructing a scalable method for mechanically harvesting male wheat spikescontaining mature viable pollen (2) Construct a scalable prototype to validate the concept ofseparating anthers containing viable pollen from green plant material and (3) Develop and provean efficient method of liberating viable pollen grains from intact wheat anthers for subsequentconditioning and storage.Anticipated Results and Potential Commercial Applications:® Our preliminary data show that PowerPollen technology extends the viability of wheat pollendramatically.Pollen with the highest viability resides in anthers which can be isolated from theflowers mechanically.We anticipate the novel methods being evaluated in this Phase I projectwill provide sufficient volumes of viable wheat pollen to enable bulk storage and field-scaleevaluation of on-demand applications in Phase II.We have existing relationships with major seed®companies and have demonstrated the value of PowerPollen in maize under commercial fieldconditions.Our communications with leadership in the hybrid wheat industry and wheat breedersconfirm that current hybrid wheat production systems result in only about 40 to 50% seed set dueto inadequate pollinations.The cost to produce hybrid seed using cytoplasmic male sterility isabout $1000 per hectare; the cost is more than double that value using gametocide to inducesterility.A productive female inbred allowed to self-pollinate can produce 6 tons/hectare.If sowell-managed hybrid system requiring 35% male inbred achieving 50% seed set would yield about® 2 tons per hectare under favorable conditions. Assuming conservatively that a PowerPollenapplication can result in 75% seed set this would result in a 50% increase in hybrid seed yield to® 3 tons per hectare.At a COGS for hybrid wheat seed of $500/ton the value add for PowerPollenin this scenario is about $500 per hectare.A licensing/royalty fee that captures 25% of this valuewould equate to $125 of revenue per hectare.The value add would be more than double forgametocide-based systems and if the area allocated to male inbreds could be decreased. Using this® model and projected market penetration we expect significant revenue for wheat PowerPollenwithin 5 years after completion of this Phase I project with revenues reaching $38MM for 10%marke