“Crop breeding remains a fiddly business. Plant geneticists must decide which traits they are looking for, cross plants which appear to possess them, run a series of field trials and wait to see if their new plants are an improvement. The interplay between a plant’s genes and the weather, the soil condition and scores of other environmental variables in which it grows, are complex. Working out which genetics suit which conditions can take decades, as it did Borlaug in Mexico.

Heritable Agriculture, which spun out of X, Alphabet’s moonshot lab, in December, aims to speed things up. The idea is to use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict, for a given environment, which genetic changes will improve a crop’s yield, as well as other properties like taste, nutritional content and photosynthetic capacity…

Brad Zamft, Heritable’s co-founder, says the firm’s system can breed a crop with the right genetics to achieve a desired trait in just one year. He presented data validating Heritable’s approach at the Plant and Animal Genome Conference in San Diego on January 13th. They showed that the firm’s software can be used to quickly breed corn with fine-grained control over the time it takes to flower. Heritable says it has already used its software to breed plants with specific properties for undisclosed customers, including tastier leafy green vegetables.”

From The Economist.