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Bayer Licenses PPI Technology to Improve Wheat Performance

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Bayer CropScience and Performance Plants have entered into a third licensing deal, this time aimed at improving wheat performance, they announced today.

Bayer will license PPI's Heat & Drought Tolerance Technology, a technology which could enhance a plant's tolerance to heat, drought, or combined stresses, the companies said. The deal follows an earlier agreement between Bayer CropScience and PPI in 2009, which provided Bayer a license to PPI"s Yield Protection Technology for evaluation in cotton, and a deal in 2011 in which Bayer licensed the HDT technology for evaluation and commercialization in cotton.

PPI's technologies identify and uses a plant's own native genes to increase crop yield, it and Bayer said.

Terms of today's agreement were not disclosed.

"We continue to invest in bringing new wheat seed varieties to market which addresses both the environmental challenges of production and the opportunity for new levels of yield," Steve Patterson, responsible for Cereals Crop Management at Bayer CropScience, said in a statement. "[I]t is our intention to use the full range of technologies in both breeding and trait development to bring higher yielding wheat varieties to the market and then adapt these to the local market needs."

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