Project: an innovative kit for PREDICting SEED quality.
The world market for seed exportation was $10,000 Million in 2011. This activity is supported by high quality control for seed trait and germination rate, vigour or priming are routinely evaluated by germinating billion seeds, which is costly, time, energy and water consuming. The main objective of PREDICSEED is to set up a new reliable, fastest and cheapest high-throughput assay, for seed quality prediction based on Activity-Based Protein Profiling technology. ABPP employs synthetic molecular probes reacting with active sites of enzymes and was successfully tested on seed proteomes extracted from tomato, maize, melon, cabbage and lettuce, for quality prediction at the laboratory level at MPIPZ (German public partner) in collaboration with NINSAR (Catalonian company). The invention protected by patent (PCT/WO2012/100963) is reliable in laboratory but has to be implemented for seed company requirements. For this purpose, NINSAR and BREUN (German SME) are providing to PREDICSEED selected seeds of vegetable and field crops, respectively. Based on the discriminative pattern between different seed qualities detected at MPIPZ, the Catalonian SME ABBCN will generate Monoclonal Antibodies (MAbs) against the trait-related proteins extracted from seeds and conjugated to ABPP probes, specifically for a selected trait. In parallel and through heterologous protein expression method, MICROCOAT (German SME) will also produce MAbs against the protein isoforms, as an alternative approach. These antibodies will allow the development of ELISA assays, to be assembled and produced by MICROCOAT for large scale testing on vegetable and field crop seeds by BREUN, NiNSAR and its 3 shareholder seed companies: SEMILLAS FITO, GAUTIER SEMENCES and BHN SEED. Finally, PREDICSEED project will allow to transform the laboratory ABBP assay into a high-throughput ELISA kit for seed trait prediction in the Quality Control departments of the seed companies, offering an international market access.
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