Amsterdam, The Netherlands & San Carlos, CA, U.S.A.
August 27, 2026
Heritable Agriculture and Annogen Agri B.V. today announced a collaboration to functionally annotate non-coding variants in maize. Annogen will apply its SuRE™ platform to measure, directly in plant protoplasts, how these non-coding variants affect gene expression.
By separating variants that drive gain- or loss-of-function from those with no effect, the collaboration pinpoints the sequences most likely to deliver a trait. The resulting functional data strengthen the sequence-to-expression rules behind Heritable Agriculture’s AI platform for identifying the bases that regulate gene expression, leading to improved plant performance. This will also let Heritable Agriculture focus resource-intensive in planta and field validation on a small, high-confidence set, reducing the number of variants that must be tested and shortening development timelines.
“We’re excited to work with Annogen because their high-throughput platform will allow us to iterate more efficiently than if we optimized the assay in-house. That means we can evaluate more variants more quickly, giving us a way to rapidly test our models.”
Davide Sosso, Chief Science Officer, Heritable Agriculture
“We are proud to collaborate with Heritable, a leader in AI-driven trait design. This partnership reinforces our belief that purpose-build, large-scale experimental datasets are essential for building high-performing AI models that will transform how gene regulatory elements are engineered.”
Joris van Arensbergen, CEO & Founder, Annogen Agri B.V.
About Annogen Agri B.V.
Annogen Agri B.V. is a contract research organization based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Its proprietary SuRE™ (Survey of Regulatory Elements) platform validates, rather than predicts, the activity of millions of regulatory DNA elements in parallel, in vitro or directly in plants, letting leading agricultural developers discover cell-, tissue- and species-specific promoters and functionally annotate the non-coding variants that drive crop traits. By screening thousands of candidates and their variants in a single experiment, Annogen sharpens target identification for genome editing and EMS mutagenesis to prioritize the most promising elements, meaning far fewer need to be validated through transformation and field trials, thereby cutting development timelines.
About Heritable Agriculture
Heritable Agriculture Inc. is a company focused on advancing all corners of the agricultural system – all crops, all locations, all traits. Located in San Carlos, California, the company is committed to applying advanced genomics, remote sensing, and AI to solve critical challenges in food security and crop development globally.
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