The Missouri-headquartered agricultural biotech company, Edison Agrosciences is tapping new sources of natural rubber. In view of this, it has initiated a US$1 million Phase II research contract sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) research contract will fund further development of Edison’s sunflower rubber technology for the domestic production of natural rubber in sunflower plants.
Edison is collaborating on this contract with the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis to increase the level of rubber naturally produced in the leaves of the sunflower plant. It says that sunflower leaves contain 1 – 2% of their weight in natural rubber and increasing the amount by a few percentage points would make sunflower an economical, and geographically diverse, source of natural rubber.
Developing a sunflower rubber crop can diversify global rubber production and provide the US, which obtains its rubber mostly from Southeast Asia, with an alternative source for this important commodity, it says.