A growing global population and a changing climate necessitates a more productive and resilient agricultural system, creating a challenge for crop breeders to improve crop resilience and productivity at an unprecedented pace. FACE™ provides a navigation system that allows breeders to rapidly identify the genomic variants required to generate desired traits, especially through pinpointing gain-of-function variants and is therefore essential for engineering the next generation of crops.
How does FACE™ work?
Annogen’s Functional Analysis for Crop Engineering (FACE™) assay is based on our proprietary SuRE™ platform, a massive parallel reporter system that allows functional screening of millions of sequences during a transient transfection – in the case of crops using protoplasts or agrobacterium. FACE™ hereby provides a solution for crop improvement by empowering crop engineers to efficiently assess the impact of thousands of non-coding variants on gene expression in cells in vitro before making laborious genome edits in vivo.
Applications and benefits of FACE™ for agricultural biotechnology companies
- Identify the sequences that regulate gene expression: While most genome-editing strategies focus on coding sequences, editing promoters and enhancers is another way of engineering gene expression and is more efficient in achieving gene upregulation. FACE™ can generate genome-wide profiles of promoter and enhancer activity, providing a roadmap for gene expression engineering.
- Efficient assessment of thousands of potential edits in parallel: FACE™ can test thousands of potential edits to the promoter region to efficiently identify mutations that can lead to increased expression.
- Functional testing of promoter mutations in an EMS seed bank to find those that upregulate your gene of interest: EMS seed banks are typically used for mutations in coding regions, because there we can predict the functional consequence of the mutation. Using FACETM, promoter mutations can also be functionally tested, for example to identify those mutations that lead to gene upregulation.
- Reducing costs and timelines: FACE™ screens thousands of variants in parallel in a matter of months, prioritizing a number of variants for which it is now feasible to perform edits and analysis in plants.
Unlocking the True Potential of Your Crops
FACE™ empowers researchers to unlock the inherent potential within crops, paving the way for addressing the most pressing agricultural challenges. Ready to FACE the true potential of your crop? Our team of experts is dedicated to supporting your research and development efforts, as we have done for numerous top agricultural companies before.
