Visions become
reality

When the first publication on successful gene transfer from a bacterium to a plant appeared in 1983, it fundamentally changed plant breeding worldwide. KWS was swift to recognize the momentous import of this milestone. The vision was that biotechnology could offer possible solutions to agricultural problems that could be achieved through conventional breeding only over a very long time, if at all. That sparked a race against the competition in our own industry, but above all against the big players in agrochemicals, who were now suddenly also interested in plant breeding and already possessed far more biotechnology know-how from their pharmaceutical research.

KWS responded to this new situation, founding PLANTA Angewandte Pflanzengenetik und Biotechnologie GmbH, its own subsidiary for all biotechnology research projects, in 1984. “We started with one-and-a-half jobs back then,” Reinhard Nehls recalls. Nehls, who holds a PhD in molecular biology and joined the company from his university research post, was involved from the very beginning and ended his professional career in 2017 as Head of Research. PLANTA was disbanded in 2011 for organizational reasons and reintegrated into the parent company along with its research activities and its 130 employees.

Growth in know-how

Nehls has a lot to tell about KWS’ biotechnology research activities over the past 35 years. Cell and tissue culture, a field that has been important for practical plant breeding from the outset, was absorbed into PLANTA. Molecular marker technology plays a major role. Alongside that, Reinhard Nehls and his steadily growing team initially had a certain amount of freedom to do what they wanted. Among other things, they created the foundations for transformation of the cells of various crops. “There was a lot of trial and error involved in our work. There was no one who already had the expertise in this field to help us. It was a bit like we were sitting in an ivory tower. That’s very different today, but the know-how for pinpointed work has also grown immensely since then.”

Within just a few years, Nehls’ team of researchers achieved a major success by genetically engineering a sugarbeet with stable virus resistance. However, the highly effective principle has not been put into practice to this day: The political and social headwinds that awaited genetic engineering in the most relevant market, Europe, meant that the necessary, costly approval procedures did not seem like a sensible investment. Moreover, varieties that were at least virus-tolerant had been able to be bred conventionally in the meantime.

In addition, the economic interests of the agrochemical companies, which were needed as cooperation partners in biotechnology, were diametrically opposed. They expected seed breeding companies to develop herbicide-tolerant plants using genetic engineering methods. KWS won the race against the competition in the sugarbeet arena. Research into glyphosate- and glufosinate-tolerant beet began in 1985. They were based on highly complex molecular biology processes and had to comply with ever stricter regulatory requirements as part of the social discourse. As a result, it was 22 years before the Roundup Ready® varieties, which had only been approved for the North American market, could finally be sold in 2007. The market share of these KWS varieties there is now over 90 percent.

In the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, however, biotechnology research projects were not confined to sugarbeet, which many at the time predicted would have a pretty difficult future. Alongside that, the company also worked intermittently on other crops such as oilseed rape, potatoes and cereals. As corn business became increasingly successful, KWS became interesting as a biotech licensee for the dominant companies in the American corn market (Monsanto and Syngenta). In order to regain its entrepreneurial independence, KWS founded the joint venture Genective together with Limagrain in 2013, with the aim of developing its own plant genetic traits together with biotech start-ups, for example AgBiome. That work was done in Einbeck, St. Louis and Chappes until 2019, and has been continued since then in Genective’s own laboratories in the U.S.