Screening Plant Cells Before Plants Exist Could Cut Breeding Time and Cost

Plant breeding is a numbers game, and most of the numbers are expensive. Whether you cross two parents or edit a gene, you usually have to grow hundreds or thousands of plants to find the handful worth testing further. Amatera, a company co-founded in 2022 by CEO Omar Dekkiche and CTO Lucie Kriegshauser, wants to move that filtering step much earlier, to the level of individual plant cells.

Screening before the plant exists

The conventional workflow runs in a fixed order. Cells are coaxed into whole plants, those plants are grown out, and only then does genotyping or field screening reveal which ones are useful. Plenty of labor goes into the plants that will never matter. Dekkiche put the problem bluntly: "Today, the standard approach is to take these cells, first turn them into plants, and then do genotyping to see what you have."

Amatera reverses that order. It isolates single cells, grows each one separately in plant cell culture at lab scale, and screens those cell lines. Only the lines with the desired characteristics get regenerated into plants, which then move to nursery and field testing. In Dekkiche's words, "Instead of regenerating all the cells into plants and then screening the plants, we have removed the screening bottleneck."

The company's starting point is spontaneous genetic variation. It applies physical and chemical treatments to induce variation, creating a large library of non-GMO cell lines, then sequences and screens them. The same automated screening can also run on cell lines produced by gene editing, so the platform isn't tied to one method of generating diversity.

Why more breeders don't do this

Cell-stage screening sounds simple on paper, but it demands two things most breeding programs don't have in-house. The first is cell biology expertise, specifically the ability to take single plant cells and get them to grow. The second is automation. Handling individual cells by hand isn't practical at the scale a high-throughput screen requires, so robotics becomes part of the core method rather than an optional upgrade.

Amatera says it has built a full pipeline covering single-cell microculture and growth, and has patented it. That patent position matters because it's what separates a platform from a technique other labs could reproduce from a paper.

What the savings claim rests on

Here's the thing about the headline numbers: they're still projections. Dekkiche said the company is generating lab data on how much time and money the approach saves, and expects savings of at least five times on cost and two times on time compared with conventional methods. Those are the figures to watch, but they haven't been independently published, and the comparison baseline will matter when they are. A fivefold cost reduction against a lean program means something different from the same figure against a large, mature one.

The gap between a cell and a field

A cell in a dish doesn't face drought, soil microbes or shifting weather, and that's the obvious skeptic's question. Dekkiche's answer was measured. Cell-level screening works for traits that can be tied to a known genetic marker, which means the target gene must be identified and the switch to a new function understood. The company is focused on those traits for now, while developing additional screening methods for characteristics that lack a clear marker.

The limits are explicit. Caffeine production is a good fit, because cells can be checked for the metabolism that produces it. Drought tolerance and yield resistance are not, at least not yet. Amatera isn't claiming them. That restraint is useful for readers to keep in mind, since traits that depend heavily on whole-plant or field conditions will still need whole-plant testing.

Crops in the pipeline

The first crops are coffee and grapes. On coffee, Amatera is working on two directions: a naturally caffeine-free variety and Robustica, a coffee designed to taste like Arabica while carrying Robusta's resilience. For Robustica, the company has identified new genes linked to quality and is now validating them. Dekkiche was clear that the variety is still some distance from market. For the caffeine-free variety, known genes exist, but the team has found new ones it considers better suited to the goal.

On grapes, the work targets wine grapes resistant to downy mildew and powdery mildew. Dekkiche noted that fungal disease is the main problem for grapevines, at least in Europe, which makes disease resistance a practical priority rather than a niche trait. For growers and wineries, a resistant variety could mean fewer fungicide applications, though the company hasn't quantified any such change.

From lab platform to industrial tool

Dekkiche described the next phase as "industrialization": combining cell biology, robotics, machine learning and AI into one end-to-end device that can run plant cell regeneration autonomously. That's a substantial engineering goal, and it's the stage where many promising lab workflows stall. Amatera recently closed a seed round to fund it and secured a place in the EIC Accelerator program, a European Union-backed scheme, in June.

Amatera also says it's moving toward annual staple crops and expects to announce partners in the coming months, though it hasn't named any yet. If that expansion works, the bigger test will be whether cell-stage screening holds up across crops with very different genetics and trait targets, and whether the cost and time savings survive the move from lab to commercial breeding programs. That's the data I'd want to see first.