Facilities in the Netherlands and Spain will be added to Gardin’s cooperation with Enza Zaden in 2022 and 2023. Without requiring any assistance from our team, Gardin measures key plant performance indicators exactly where the plants were grown. The lead scientist at Gardin, Dr. Fabrizio Ticchiarelli-Marjot, stated: “We were able to identify unsuspected patterns in the response of some vegetable crop kinds to abiotic stress.”
It is important to understand how plants respond to environmental stress in order to develop high-performance varieties and effectively cultivate crops. The team at Enza Zaden is particularly aware of this and works to create hardy cultivars for growers worldwide. Enza Zaden plans to expand its collaboration with Gardin across their Netherlands and Spain locations in 2023 following a successful trial in September 2022.
According to Dr. Chiara Volpi, senior researcher at Enza, “The Gardin technology was tested on some of our breeding lines. The ability to see how plants respond to stress in real-time has been very valuable for understanding their potential. Not only does this allow us to be aware of stress before it becomes visible, but it also provides an objective and quantifiable way of understanding the impact of environmental variability and differences between varieties, as well as the effectiveness of treatments. The Gardin platform autonomously and directly measured crucial parameters of plant performance at the site where the plants were growing, without any intervention from our team. This, along with the analytics capabilities provided by the Gardin team, allowed us to gather important data from our research experiments to accelerate variety development.”
Both companies believe that the expansion of their collaboration has the potential to yield positive results in the weeks, months, or years to come. Dr. Fabrizio Ticchiarelli-Marjot, Gardin’s lead biologist, commented: “Working with Chiara and Duy at Enza Zaden has been a great experience. They are world-class scientists. We were able to observe unexpected patterns in the way some vegetable crop varieties responded to abiotic stress, and we hope these insights will help Enza Zaden bring these crops to market as soon as possible. Next year, we are looking forward to expanding the range of species we will work on together, which will help many people at Enza Zaden and accelerate their pipelines. This will also ensure that Gardin’s predictive analytics are trained from the start on some of the most innovative crops that will reach the market. This will put us in a strong position to serve commercial growers worldwide.”
Image provided by Gardin
