Yield10 Biosciences is an agricultural bioscience company that is using its differentiated trait gene discovery platform—the Trait Factory—to develop improved Camelina varieties for the production of proprietary seed products, and to discover highly valuable genetic traits for the agriculture and food industries. It also develops new technologies to achieve improvements in crop yield to enhance global food security.
Currently, Yield10 is focusing their efforts on commercializing the Camelina crop as the next big oilseed. CEO Dr. Oliver Peoples says not only does it offer a cash cover crop with potential for low carbon intensity oil and biofuel, but it also can be developed to be used in bioplastics.
Yield10’s website states that its predecessor company, “Metabolix, was a pioneer in the development of advanced PHA bioplastics production technology using engineered microbes and fermentation, and as a result, developed deep experience across the PHA bioplastics value chain. PHAs are naturally produced by some microbes as carbon storage molecules.
“In addition, Metabolix supported a crop science research program to produce PHA biomaterials in crops as a potential low-cost production system. Historically, these efforts in crops were focused on producing PHB, the simplest member of the PHA family.
“In its research, Yield10 has produced PHB in high concentrations in the seeds of oilseed crops or the leaves of biomass crops such as switchgrass. The PHB biomaterial is useful as a natural water treatment product and as a replacement for petroleum-based plastics. In addition, it produces a relatively abundant harvest of oil-containing seeds.
“For more than a decade, Yield10 has been researching seed yield in Camelina, identifying and deploying new gene traits, evaluating the performance of these novel traits in field tests, developing PHA bioplastics in seed, and securing exclusive rights to omega-3 oils technology”.
Dr. Peoples said “We have a family of natural biopolymers; polymers that are basically polyesters. And these are more broadly known as PHA bioplastics. And what we see there is a tremendous potential to shift the value proposition for camelina to almost double the value of the seed harvest. And there’s three products that would be recovered from that seed. There would be some oil for biofuels. The protein meal would basically stay the same for the feed markets. But then we would get this value added product, which is probably has got a value about, you know, 2x feed stock oil. And that’s kind of the key to the whole thing is a natural polymer, very useful to replace petroleum plastics, a hundred percent biodegradable. And so you are actually, by doing a winter cover crop making this product, you’re actually adding food production, you’re adding additional oil production and you’re getting this value added product, which I think has got just tremendous potential.”
