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Powering High-Throughput Plant Genetics to Cultivate the Fruits and Vegetables of Tomorrow
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Agriculture
- Food & Beverage
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Predictive Quality Analytics
- Root Cause Analysis & Diagnosis
Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Pairwise, a company that uses CRISPR and gene editing to develop new varieties of fruits and vegetables, faced several challenges. The nature of plant genetics meant that each plant had its own phenotypic and genotypic characteristics, requiring individual tracking. This resulted in sample sets often containing hundreds of entities, each with its own optimization needs and custom steps. This is significantly larger than a typical biopharma sample set. Additionally, plant-based workflows required more complex infrastructure, more team handoffs, and longer timelines compared to cell-based workflows. Pairwise needed a centralized, easily-accessible way to organize and communicate experiment data to every team, from discovery to development. Program leaders also needed to turn thousands of data points into insights to drive decision making. They needed pre-computed reports aggregating metrics for successful plants each week to move forward with.
About The Customer
Pairwise is a company that is uniquely situated between agriculture and biotech. They apply cutting-edge technologies such as CRISPR gene editing and next-generation sequencing (NGS) to one of the oldest human technologies: food cultivation. Pioneering this field presents a particular set of technical challenges. Their tools must be customizable to fit agriculture-focused experiments and workflows, while also supporting the cutting-edge scientific techniques that they’re applying to agriculture for the first time. They turned to Benchling for a flexible, cloud-based platform that could track and streamline both the agricultural and biotechnological aspects of their R&D. The company is based in Durham, NC and has between 51-250 employees.
The Solution
Benchling provided a robust plant registry that tied actions like inventory tracking, data collection, and seed retrieval to the plant in question. This Registry provided a convenient system within which Pairwise could track their entire plant development pipeline. The pipeline began with an idea for a potentially beneficial gene edit. Researchers then designed plasmids and checked the gene edit’s sequencing results using Benchling Molecular Biology. Once a plasmid had been selected and validated, transformations into plants happened on a large scale. Templatized Benchling Notebook entries and workflows helped standardize data collection during large-scale gene editing and plant growth. As plants moved from the wet lab to the greenhouse, Benchling Requests provided a single communication point, ensuring that every handoff took place under identical conditions. Plants were molecularly screened using NGS, and seeds were only collected from those capable of passing on the desired trait. The subsequent generation was then screened to confirm the trait had been inherited. Benchling associated each plant’s database entry with these experimental results, making it easy to identify candidate plants and seeds, and discard undesirable ones. API access allowed Pairwise to pull data directly from specialized instruments and to build customized report views.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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