Unit Mission

Argentina’s economy is mainly based on agriculture production, and its added value. Growing world population hints the need to increase the production of food. By 2050, we expect a population of 9.6 billon inhabitants, whereas natural resources will certainly not increase accordingly, neither in amount nor quality. Since the beginning of agriculture, manhood has tried and successfully achieved to improve crops by crossing and selection. However, traditional methods have proved to be slow and are limited to genetically available varieties. Plant Biotechnology will potentially contribute to crops improvement in shorter periods of time, generating more productive varieties, or expanding the boarders of lands used for agriculture.

The development of genetically modified crops with improved traits is one of the founding goals of IAL. Since the early days of our Institute, novel technologies have been developed to successfully cope with environmental cues. Nowadays, obtaining genetically modified crops is one of the main constraints for the development and trade of these technologies. Currently, crops transformation is not regularly performed in our country, neither for fundamental research nor for services offered by public organizations or private companies. Instead, certain crops can be transformed abroad by multinational companies. As a result, prices are very high and the legal procedure includes the compromise to use the genetically modified plants only for fundamental research, without the FTO (free to operate) permission. Moreover, the varieties used for transformation are non-commercial and far from the elite crops which would rapidly compete in the market. Therefore, considering that crops transformation has been identified as a key step for the development of agro biotechnologies, CONICET decided to support the initiative to set a platform for crops transformation and improvement.