TraitSeq – An AI Technology Platform for Accelerating Trait Development in Agriculture

TraitSeq is addressing the significant challenge in the agritech sector of predicting complex, polygenic traits reliably and accurately; enabling the development of high-yielding and climate-resilient crop varieties, animal breeds, agrochemical and biological inputs, and gene edits that are critical to feeding an increasing global population.

Current methods for predicting trait performance in agriculture use models that are limited in their ability to account for complex interactions between genes and strong environmental factors. In addition to these limitations, measuring complex traits requires a significant investment through field trials that require considerable domain expertise, land, and time.

The market needs a scalable solution to accelerate our understanding of complex traits and the ability to measure them; especially as sustainability and resilience traits such as nitrogen-use efficiency, feed efficiency, and drought tolerance are currently of paramount importance due to challenges posed by our increasingly volatile climate.

TraitSeq's technology exploits cutting-edge advances in artificial intelligence that are capable of harnessing complex gene expression and environmental interactions to predict complex traits at beyond state-of-the-art levels of accuracy. Through applying TraitSeq's technology to discover biomarkers and generate accurate trait predictions, agritech companies are empowered to screen their genetic varieties and products for complex traits without performing field trials -- potentially saving years and £1,000,000s in product development.

In 2022, TraitSeq's team participated in BBSRC's ICURe Programme through which we interacted with over 35 companies in the agritech sector and identified a set of value propositions for how our technology can address the market's needs. Since participating in ICURe, the team has leveraged these value propositions to generate significant market traction and expects to partner with 5 companies in 2023 to trial TraitSeq's technology across a variety of applications.

Through these international partnerships, TraitSeq will help develop crop and livestock traits that contribute to increased yields whilst reducing nitrous oxide and methane production -- two of the most harmful emissions in agriculture.

Innovate UK's Follow-on Funding will enable TraitSeq to validate and demonstrate our technology in commercial environments whilst developing it to improve its affordability and scalability. This funding will allow us to apply our technology to a new sector (livestock breeding), considerably increasing TraitSeq's market opportunities and enabling our technology to make a significant impact on accelerating the development of agricultural traits beyond crops.