META HELIX LIFE SCIENCES PRIVATE LIMITED

Metahelix is an agricultural biotechnology company focusing on developing traits and technologies for crop protection & improved productivity. Metahelix leverages its expertise in crop genetics and plant biotechnology to develop high performance hybrid seeds in rice, maize, cotton and millets for Indian markets with transgenic traits for insect, viral and fungal protection traits. Hybrid Seeds and traits are commercialized by its wholly owned subsidiary seeds business Dhaanya Seeds. Metahelix has three distinct functional groups that work in tandem to meet the overall organizational goals – Crop Breeding, Trait Development and Regulatory Sciences. Our core crops among the field crops are Rice, Maize, Cotton and Millets and among the vegetable crops are tomato, hot-pepper and okra where we have strong programs in crop breeding and trait development. The crop breeding programmes are located at Bangalore (Rice, Maize & Vegetable crops), Hyderabad (Rice and Cotton) and Ahmedabad (Millets). In addition, a trialing network consisting of about 21 different locations spread out all over the country, assists the systematic evaluation of hybrids generated by the crop breeding program. Our biotechnology capability includes all the aspects of gene mining, development, molecular biology, crop transformation, phenotyping, assaying and trait development. The biotech activities of Metahelix are based at Bangalore. The transgenic traits being developed include Bt Cotton(Bollworm and Spodoptera tolerance), Bt Rice (Yellow Stem Borer tolerance). In addition, new and novel RNAi technologies are being developed for virus and fungal tolerance traits in rice, maize and vegetable crops.