Thank you very much for letting me make this presentation to you today.
My own background is that I was a professor at Queen's University for 28 years before we founded a company in 1996.
Just about two weeks ago, Sir David King, the chief science advisor to the U.K., said that the U.K. must embrace GM crops because it's crucial for the revolution we need to feed nine billion people in the world before 2050.
Performance Plants is a Canadian plant biotechnology company. We have an 11-year history. We have labs in Saskatoon and Kingston. We completed the biggest private equity financing in 2006 in ag-biotech, and we've got licence agreements with the major multinationals. We just moved into a new facility a few months ago in Kingston; it is state of the art and gives us a tremendously enlarged capacity.
We target two markets: food, which means we've got to get more seeds per acre to give us more oil, protein, and starches; and biofuels, which means more energy per acre for things like ethanol and biodiesel. We have 47 patents issued and pending around the world.
The drivers for new crop traits are that there's no new arable land available in the world. We're using all the land available. Global warming is going to cause drought and heat, which is again going to reduce yields and give us great problems. We've got depletion of fresh water supplies, which is probably going to be an even bigger problem than global warming and climate change. We've got to increase yields per acre, or else we're going to have major problems.
The drivers for biofuels are reducing Canada's carbon dioxide emissions and finding alternatives to fossil fuels. The timelines for doing this are very short. We've got to move on this very quickly.
In terms of new crops for biofuels, we must increase the mass of the entire plant for biofuels, whether you're making ethanol, biodiesel, biogas, incineration products, or bioproducts. We've got to increase the amount we can produce per acre by large amounts.
The crops we're going to be growing are in fact new types of crops--sweet sorghum, hemp, poplar, miscanthus, switchgrass, and a variety of other novel crops--which will give us high biomass per acre.
In our own technologies we have developed drought-resistant plants, which we call YPT technology--the yield protection technology. On the next slide you'll see the impact of drought flowering on corn development. A normal corncob is somewhere between 450 and 500 kernels, and if you have drought, flowering can get down to something like 15 kernels. It's a massive problem.
We have made this little plant called arabidopsis drought resistant. These are plants that have not been given any water for eight days. You'll see the plant on the left, the parent plant, is dead, but the other plants will in fact survive and produce a crop.
Unfortunately, you can't see my movies, but if anybody wants to see the movies afterwards, I've got them on my computer with me, and we'll send a disk for anyone who wants to see them.
We've done this with canola. We've had field trials now with canola for four years. If you look at the next slide, the amount of oil we're producing, the light blue shows the control plants, and the dark blue is the impact of our technology on improving yields of canola plants under different conditions. In 2003 there was no drought, and you can see we don't get a loss in yield; there is a slight increase.
We're producing a whole series of other crops; BET is increased biomass. We can increase the biomass of a plant by six to ten times, so this is going to be useful for biofuel crops. We're making crops that can break down more rapidly. This is a big problem when making ethanol from plants as a whole, rather than just from starch, and we've got some now that will break down incredibly rapidly.
We've got the WET technique, which allows plants to use water more efficiently, and we have a HEAT technique that prevents damage to plants during heat. In canola, a 29-degree temperature will in fact reduce the yield dramatically; just this morning I got some data suggesting that with our technology we can increase the yield under heat conditions by something like 40% to 50%.
The next photograph shows you the impact of our BET gene. You get a huge increase in the stem size and, again, a great increase in the biomass. This is a wonderful movie, but unfortunately you can't see it. If anybody wants to see it afterwards, I can certainly show it to you.
We're taking our technologies to Africa. We've been working with a person called Florence Wambugu, one of the most marvellous people I've ever met. She now is the president of the Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation International in Kenya. We've got the alliance in place and we're now looking for funding from foundations to support this and to develop new crops. The first one will be for drought. Drought is a huge problem in Africa, as you know. As Florence says, Africa cannot afford to be excluded from the biotech revolution, so we're developing this. We hope that in the next very short while we will in fact be developing things like white corn for African countries.
That is my presentation.
Thank you very much.