munich

The German pharmaceutical and chemical company BASF last week announced a major research collaboration with the Swedish seed-breeding company Svalöf Weibull (SW). BASF and SW will merge their research activities in an attempt to become one of the world's leading plant biotechnology companies.

A mutual company, BASF Plant Sciences, will be set up in Ludwigshafen, near the BASF headquarters. Its research budget will be DM100 million (US$59 million) a year, jointly financed by BASF and SW.

BASF Plant Sciences will set research goals in plant biotechnology and coordinate internal research by the two companies, distribute research tasks among existing joint ventures, and commission external research, for example at universities.

BASF believes plant biotechnology is one of the most promising areas of commerce, and will pour DM500 million into research over the next three years, 20 per cent of the company's life-science research budget.

Two joint ventures were founded last summer: the Berlin-based Metanomics, and SunGene at Gatersleben in the German state of Sachsen-Anhalt. They will each eventually employ 50 scientists and technicians.

Metanomics is linked to the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam, of which one of Metanomics' partners, Lothar Willmitzer, is a director. Its research will focus on understanding which plant genes are responsible for biological functions such as growth and response to environmental stress.

SunGene, founded jointly by BASF and the Institute for Plant Genetics and Cultivated Plants Research in Gatersleben, is to develop techniques for adding genes to a cultivated plant's genome.

BASF Plant Sciences is intended to act as a ‘technology platform’ for the two companies, as well as for SW's existing research and development facilities in plant biotechnology. SW will bring the interests of its four research units into the firm: DNA LandMarks, based in Quebec, the Swedish companies Amylogene and Lipogene, and the Swedish-based Nilsson-Ehle Laboratory.

Plant geneticists at the University of Freiburg are already profiting from a DM30 million collaboration with BASF, which pays for the salaries and equipment of 40 scientists and technicians. The group is headed by Ralf Reski, a botanist who found that single genes of the moss Physcomitrella patens can be knocked out by homologue recombination.

Reski hopes the moss will become a model organism for basic research, similar to the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana, but with a far lower recombination efficiency. Last spring Reski convinced BASF of his work's potential, the commercial aspects of which are to be investigated further by companies such as Metanomics and SunGene.