Striped green fields seen from above, a row of trees casting long shadows at dusk

The next generation of biocontrols has already evolved.

We find them in disease-suppressive soils, reconstruct their genomes and mine them for new ways to control crop pathogens.

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THE PROBLEM

20–30% of major crop production is lost to pests and pathogens each year.

Source: Savary et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2019.

Crop protection needs new modes of action.

Resistance is rising. Established active ingredients are being withdrawn. New solutions are not arriving fast enough.

Source: Pest Management Science, DOI 10.1002/ps.70522

FUSARIUM HEAD BLIGHT

Wheat

$2.9B

estimated loss

Soybean rust

Soybean

>$2B

annual impact

Late blight

Potato

~$6.1B

annual impact

Rice blast

Rice

>$2B

annual impact

For us, One Health starts in the soil. We start with healthier crops and soils, but our vision reaches across plants, animals, people and the environment.

Pipeline

Field evidence identifies the microbial taxa associated with disease suppression.

THE MODEL

LOAM is the foundation of this unique pipeline.

A family of genomic language models (gLMs) trained on the DNA of soil microbial communities. Trained on about 67.5 billion DNA bases from 15,640 public long-read microbial genomes, with a context window long enough to use genomic context across several thousand bases.

Deep Learning

Read the DNA and map the biological diversity within microbial communities.

Interpret genomes

Infer what genes and biological systems do.

Find antimicrobials

Identify peptides and proteins that may inhibit pathogens.

Rank candidates

Prioritise the most promising sequences.

Design actives

Generate and optimise sequences for a target activity.

BENCHMARK

Consistent gains across benchmarks

All models were trained on the same corpus and setup. Performance rises with model size on variant effect and enzyme function, and levels off on gene essentiality.

We change one letter of a bacterial gene and test whether the model's surprise at the change tracks its measured effect on the organism.