Plant Sensory Systems

Plant Sensory Systems (PSS), an agricultural biotech company, develops agronomical traits to optimize crop production and improve nutritional value and crop resiliency. PSS integrated its biological sensory expertise with metabolic analytics to develop its Signaling Enhanced Network Systems (SENS) platform.

PSS’s SENS technology has successfully developed crop traits, including increased yield (the Yield Trait, YT); enhanced nutrition (EN); increased oil (metabolic regulators, MR); taurine production, and pest tolerance.

The YT has improved plant vigor and root architecture and increased crop yield across various crops using single nucleotide polymorphism edited traits.

The MR technology controls biosynthetic pathways in crops for inhibition or over-expression of rate-limiting genes, being able to target different pathways, including the uptake, assimilation, and distribution of nutrients or minerals to improve plant growth, development, and yield. MR technology is applied to oilseed crops such as soybeans, sunflowers, groundnuts, and rapeseed. PSS’s taurine technology produces a sustainable source of taurine from microbial fermentation.

PSS’s seed treatment offerings include the BrixStax foliar spray that increases a crop’s total sugars and growth optimized seed treatment. The BrixStax spray treated on sugar beets 14 days pre-harvest had 7%–18% more total sugar per acre than untreated beets. The Growth Optimized seed treatment had 18%–24% more primary root growth and 100% more root growth compared with untreated seeds.

Key customers and partnerships 

Plant Sensory Systems (PSS) partnered with DuPont in October 2011 to license nitrogen-use efficiency genes for corn to DuPont.

PSS partnered with Schillinger Genetics in June 2017 to receive a license for Schillinger’s NAVITA soybean variety and commercialize a new high-methionine soybean for animal feed.