Frequently asked questions

Most in-house promoter work is limited to testing a handful of candidates one at a time; clone, transform, measure, repeat. Our SuRE™ platform lets you screen thousands of regulatory sequences in parallel, in the actual cell or tissue system that matters for your application, so you get comparative, quantitative activity data across a whole library rather than a handful of individual data points. That scale and speed is very hard to replicate with a standard in-house cloning-and-testing workflow, and it means we can find candidates you wouldn't have thought to test, not just optimize the ones you already have. We are happy to discuss what this would look like for your specific promoter or construct. 

This is a fair concern and one we care about most ourselves, which is why we validate in relevant systems rather than relying on in silico predictions. Protoplasts are a screening tool, not an endpoint: we use protoplasts from the relevant tissue rather than defaulting to a single generic system, so the screen reflects real plant biology as closely as possible at that stage. But the real test is what happens next. Promising elements from the screen are validated in planta, and where clients including KeyGene and KWS have fed back on in-planta performance, the trends measured in the screen held up. We are happy to discuss the specific evidence for your application. 

Depending on the species, we can do it at the scale your programs actually need. For focused libraries, we run direct in-planta screening via vacuum leaf infiltration of Agrobacterium. As a proof-of-concept in Nicotiana, which can be optimized for other species too, we have tested libraries of around 2,000 variants (traced by dozens of barcodes each) directly in the plant’s leaves, i.e. allowing for testing tissue-specificity of promoters and enhancers directly in the organism. For larger discovery libraries (e.g. >100 million elements from a genome-wide screen), in-planta throughput may be limiting, in which case we screen at scale in tissue-relevant protoplasts and validate the strongest candidates in planta. 

You do. The data from your project become your intellectual property to protect and use, while Annogen retains ownership of the underlying SuRE™ platform and any improvements to it. We agree the exact terms with you at the start.

This is a deliberate part of how we work and is the reason many clients choose Annogen for training their lab-in-a-loop AI model training. In any case, we agree the exact terms with you at the start. 

Often very little: a defined gene of interest and the expression profile you require, and where relevant a list of candidate promoters and enhancers. Much of the work is digital, so in many cases there is no material to ship. In specific cases we may rely on your expertise in protoplast isolation. 

Often, yes. In many programs the screening results are the starting point for a gene editing approach, and the resulting plants can qualify for commercialization under New Genomic Techniques category 1 (NGT1) conditions in the EU.

In other cases the work delivers promoters or enhancers intended for a GM route. We help you choose the path that fits your trait and your target markets.