This NZ Company Is Programming Plants With Light
It’s incredible how far humanity has come with plant life in our race to create crops that can keep up with our ever-increasing demands. This started with cross-pollination and breeding plants that were more suitable for consumption. Early fruit wouldn’t have been much better than potatoes by modern standards. Then in recent years, we’ve gotten into the sticky subject of genetic modification, something you could say we’ve been in the process of our entire agricultural life. Now, thanks to a little bit of Kiwi ingenuity we’ve entered a new phase with something sort of entirely different. We’ve taken away the scalpel of cutting into DNA and are replacing it with the gentle touch of light. Ultraviolet light in fact.
I hope it’s not controversial here to say that life starts at the seed. Kiwi startup Biolumic’s UV technology uses ultraviolet light on seeds to trigger biological events within them to “dramatically upregulate plant performance.”
Upregulation is the process of increasing the response to stimulus. Biolumic has found genes within seeds that “have a function within UV signal transduction” that also happen to regulate physiological outcomes later in the seed’s life. Targeting these genes with UV can induce these genes and benefit crop yield long before they’re ever planted. To do this they needed to apply cutting-edge photobiological science, proprietary engineering, and molecular biology. From there they needed to plant the dang things and wait to see what happens and find out later which were the winning UV recipes.
“Biolumic’s light treatment science is the first of its kind in the world,” said Jason Wargent, Ph.D., Chief Science Officer and Founder of BioLumic. “By giving seeds precise ‘programs’ of light, we can biologically activate processes in plants that can dramatically upregulate crop performance. Through this breakthrough biology, we can instruct plants to be productive in ways that have never been possible before, with the potential for transformative impact on global food production.”
Founder Dr Jason Wargent has a faculty position at Massey University and is recognised as a world-leading plant UV photobiologist with over 15 years in the game and an industry-sponsored PhD from Lancaster University. The team currently stretches over New Zealand and the States.
They’ve started with the most important crops. So far an application done on corn seed and planted here in New Zealand resulted in a 10% higher yield than the control seeds. Not bad for a little bit of tanning bed treatment.
One of their targets has been targeting root growth. Good strong roots, good strong… everything else. Their UV treatments have resulted in increased biomass partitioning to roots. According to their research “When fertilized at a sub-optimum rate, BioLumic-treated head-lettuce show final yield increases greater than 100%.”
Their treatments can also boost pathogen resistance which has resulted in the lowered need for chemicals and breeding. They’ve just been primed to protect themselves better from infection. Increased hardiness has resulted in a significant gross return per acre.
Biolumic’s achievements have been recognised as the Top Innovative Product of 2023 by Seed World, now we just need a little more recognition of their amazing work right here in New Zealand.
Booster Investment Management Limited is the issuer of the Booster Innovation Scheme, Booster Innovation Fund (Fund) an investor in Biolumic Inc. The Fund’s Product Disclosure Statements are available at www.booster.co.nz or by contacting your financial adviser.