Plantik and Hudson River Target Heat-Tolerant Strawberries

Plantik Biosciences and Hudson River Biotechnology have partnered to develop heat-tolerant strawberries, combining Plantik’s trait discovery technology with Hudson River’s transgene-free genome-editing methods. The companies aim to validate a heat-tolerance trait that strawberry breeders could license and incorporate into commercial varieties, with validation trials already underway.

According to AgFunderNews, the collaboration will initially focus on strawberries, one of the crops exposed to rising temperatures because extreme heat can disrupt flowering and fruit set while reducing overall fruit quality.

The project builds on work already carried out by Plantik in tomatoes. The France-based company uses its ATLANTIS machine-learning platform to explore regulatory regions of plant DNA that control how genes are switched on and off. Plantik then edits those regions without inserting foreign DNA.

Plantik’s first product is a heat-tolerant tomato, which the company says it developed in approximately 12 months, compared with the five to eight years typically required through traditional breeding. Demonstrations are currently taking place in greenhouses and fields in the United States and Belgium.

“We have now worked on this trait in multiple tomato crops, from lab tomatoes to now commercial hybrids,” Plantik cofounder and CEO Ying Shao told AgFunderNews. “Overall, we see that in the real conditions, the material also performs much better in terms of yield preservation under high heat.”

The next challenge is transferring that approach to strawberries. Hudson River Biotechnology will contribute its BioMaas genome-editing platform, which is designed to give breeders access to editing technologies without requiring them to build costly research and development capabilities internally.

Hudson River CEO Fernando Los said the company has developed technical capabilities that allow new traits to be introduced into tomatoes and strawberries in a matter of months. In the partnership, Plantik will identify the genomic regions associated with heat tolerance, while Hudson River will carry out the required edits in strawberry plants.

Strawberries present a greater technical challenge than tomatoes because of their genetic complexity. “Strawberry is a different story from tomato because it’s genetically much more complex,” Los said. “It’s an octoploid species rather than a diploid. Propagation is normally done clonaly, so you cannot create seeds; you have to work directly in relevant commercial germplasm, which are all things that we can do.”

The collaboration is designed to reduce the technical and financial risks faced by breeders seeking to introduce complex traits. Developing genome-editing capabilities internally can require significant investment, specialized teams and lengthy research programs, particularly for smaller breeding companies.

“What we offer here is essentially de-risking and very cheap access to a piece of technology that’s normally only available to the very largest companies,” Los said. “If you reduce the failure rate from 90% to maybe 10% for a breeder, that’s a very good proposition to offer them.”

The companies ultimately want to produce a validated heat-tolerance trait available for licensing to strawberry breeders, allowing the technology to reach multiple commercial varieties rather than remaining tied to a single product.

The initiative also reflects a broader effort to develop crops capable of maintaining productivity under increasingly challenging climatic conditions. For strawberries, improving tolerance to high temperatures could help preserve flowering, fruit development, quality and yields during periods of heat stress.

Strawberries are only the starting point. Plantik and Hudson River plan to apply the same model to other crops and are inviting companies to bring additional trait challenges for strawberry varieties.

If the validation process succeeds, the partnership could create a pathway for breeders to access genome-editing technology and climate-resilience traits without developing the entire technological platform themselves, accelerating the introduction of new varieties designed for hotter growing conditions.