Evogene Ltd., a privately owned plant biotechnology company, and French scientific organization CIRAD have announced the signature of a multi-year collaboration for the development of abiotic stress tolerant cotton.
Evogene is an emerging company focused on the improvement of crops and the production of plant derived products. The company merges state-of-the-art predictive computational biology and molecular biology with advanced classical breeding technologies. Evogene’s activities were initiated in 1999 as a division of Compugen (NASDAQ: CGEN). In 2002 Evogene was created as a separate company founded by Compugen, Dr. Hagai Karchi and Dr. Rafi Meissner
CIRAD (Centre de Cooperation Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Developement) is the French agricultural research center for international development for the tropics and subtropics. CIRAD employs 1,850 people, with a budget of approximately €180 million. CIRAD's cotton program has a staff of 50, including 40 researchers and 10 technicians, in Africa, the Americas, South East Asia and Montpellier, France.
CIRAD cotton research program head Jacques Pages said, "The goal at stake is to improve cotton resistance to drought stress. This scope is clearly in CIRAD’s mandate to contribute through scientific knowledge and its application to the improvement of southern farmers’ living conditions. The project will also give opportunity to both partners to master techniques that could lead to numerous applications. It will eventually strengthen collaboration between French and Israeli scientists within the international scientific community”.
The multiyear collaboration includes technology exchanges, screening by Evogene in high abiotic stress conditions in Israel of a broad collection of wild cotton germplasm from CIRAD and introduction into cotton of proprietary gene constructs discovered by Evogene using its predictive computational biology capabilities.
Each partner will be free to exploit the product of the joint collaboration in certain geographic areas and with third parties consistent with the fulfillment of its mission.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on Wednesday, June 09, 2004