Seeking Novel Gene Regulatory Elements with Data to Confirm Efficacy in Plants

Syngenta is seeking to engage with academic partners having access to, or able to facilitate the development of, gene promoters and other regulatory elements that confer high expression levels in desired tissues without impacting pollen production.

Validating the efficacy of gene regulatory elements in maize and soya is time intensive and costly, permitting the nomination of only the highest quality candidates. Syngenta therefore seeks promoters and other regulatory elements where there is data to confirm efficacy in plants of interest. These include corn, soybean, rice, sorghum or those where there is a high level of confidence supporting a hypothesis that the dataset could be extrapolated to the plants of interest. Candidate regulatory elements should derive from plants directly, or consist of a purely synthetic construct.

Out of scope:

• Viral regulatory elements.
• Candidates lacking demonstrated performance in plants.

Supporting evidence required:

• In planta expression data from either transient or preferably stable transgenic plants (in monocots for corn elements or in dicots for soybean elements); Description of the proposed element and whether it is naturally occurring from plants unmodified, or optimized/enhanced chimeric/synthetic sequences is sought. (For evidence based synthetic elements please also specify whether these were developed through in-silico design and provide additional detail of methodology where possible).
• Confirmation that the elements are accessible - in the public domain, available for license or novel (not disclosed previously in papers, patents or applications).

Please find the attached application form to prepare a bespoke submission and see further details on the required functionality, activity, and tissue specificity patterns of potential successful promoters here.