Inventor: Anoop Tripathi, Plant Sciences
Agriculture faces a fundamental challenge. We need to produce more food while using fewer resources and adapting to increasingly unpredictable environmental conditions. This challenge is particularly severe in low and middle income countries, where millions of smallholder farmers depend on crops that are vulnerable to drought, heat and disease.
The inventor’s PhD research has focused on developing a new approach to plant biotechnology that could expand and accelerate the possibilities for crop improvement. Historically, grafting has been widely used in horticultural crops such as fruit trees, but not on cereals such as rice, wheat and maize, which are our main sources of food. The inventor used an embryonic grafting approach to enable grafting between cereal plants, in particular developing a rice-pearl millet hybrid. Rice and millet cannot be crossed through conventional plant breeding, so this approach can create genuinely new crops and seeds.
The question for the i-Team is how this technology can be used to create meaningful and affordable benefits for farmers in low and middle-income countries. By identifying and interviewing relevant experts, the i-Team will investigate which crop improvement challenges are most urgent (looking at which crop-type and which environmental challenges), where PhytoMerge could offer advantages over alternative approaches, and what partnership or business models could make the technology accessible to smallholder farmers.