‘It’s a giant iceberg, and we’re at the very tip’: Why polyploidy is taking centre stage after a century on the sidelines

David Friedberg recently revealed to an exited agtech world details about Ohalo Genetics’s radical plans to produce hardier more productive crops. This involves artificially inducing the concept of polyploidy – where an organism has more than two sets of chromosomes – to bring new levels of precision and speed to plant breeding.

Ohalo’s technology works by disenabling the reproductive circuits in each parent plant. Normally, a random half of the genes of each parent go to the offspring. But by switching off this reproductive circuit, and effectively controlling polyploidy, the offspring plant gets 100% of the genes from each parent. The fact the plant has more genes means it has more changes of inheriting a gene that will allow it to overcome or manage a stress. Ohalo’s early trials have seen “insane” yield gains of “50% to 100% or more” compared to regular plants, said Friedberg.