Creating Products and Services in Plant Biotechnology

This chapter presents a brief description of the most relevant applications of plant biotechnology, with examples of specific techniques that can be used to provide commercial products and services to customers and represent, therefore, business opportunities to entrepreneurs. Start-up companies can base their activities on the development of molecular markers, their use in MAS (marker-assisted selection) for molecular breeding programmes or in genetic fingerprinting applications; on the use of mutagenesis for generation of mutant collections in species of interest, the development of novel mutant detection methods and the phenotypic or molecular analysis of the mutants; or on applications of in vitro culture techniques. These are all services that can be offered to small breeding companies and research laboratories that do not have in-house facilities to perform these activities. Small start-ups cannot afford to bring a novel transgenic crop variety to the market; they can, however, develop and characterise the initial transgenic lines with traits of interest and transfer them (for a price) to big transnational companies, which can undertake all further field tests and marketing procedures. It can also be profitable to use GM plants as biofactories for the production of high added-value recombinant proteins or other biomolecules for different industries. Other topics included in this chapter are the applications of ‘omics’ technologies in plant biotechnology, the new business opportunities opened by the customers’ increasing interest in the products of organic agriculture and the possible commercial exploitation of some of the thousands of compounds—phytochemicals—synthesised by plants.