Cibus, Inc. announced the opening of its Oberlin facility in San Diego with its first Production Run. The 32,000 square foot Oberlin facility, powered by Cibus' proprietary Trait Machine(TM) process, is the first high-throughput trait production system for plants. The completion of this facility is an important step in Cibus' vision of the Future of Breeding that integrates High Throughput Gene Editing Systems as extensions of seed company breeding programs. With the Trait Machine process, Cibus is able to fundamentally change the way seed companies bring new traits into their advanced product pipelines and significantly accelerate the pace at which new trait innovation is delivered to the farmers.

The Trait Machine process employed at the Oberlin facility integrates crop specific RTDS(R) cell biology platforms with a series of gene editing technologies to enable a system of end-to-end crop specific precision breeding. Oberlin is currently operational for canola, winter oilseed rape, and rice. The company is dedicated to also establish cell biology platforms for soybean, wheat, and corn within the foreseeable future -- the work on soybean is most advanced.

Cibus has developed traits for both canola and winter oilseed rape, and in 2023, began transferring back to customers their elite germplasm with Cibus traits. The high-throughput capacity provided by the Oberlin production facility is important to enable Cibus to meet the demand from its seed company customers for its proprietary traits and for the development of future traits.