A University of Oxford spinout that designs improved crops for resilient agriculture has announced the acquisition of independent wheat breeding business F1 Seed Ltd.
Wild Bioscience Ltd (Wild Bio) is joining forces with F1 Seed to become a fully integrated, end-to-end UK seed company, positioning it to address the escalating crisis in British agriculture.
The company says the acquisition unites two halves of the same solution to crop improvement. F1 Seed Ltd brings a diverse germplasm pipeline built over more than a decade; Wild Bio brings evolutionary biology, gene editing, and AI-led trait discovery for precise genetic improvement. Together they form a single business able to design, breed, and deliver new wheat varieties to growers end-to-end.
By pairing scientific advancements in gene editing with a deep breeding pipeline, the integrated business can pursue traits more efficiently than either could on its own, across yield, stability, and disease resistance, and translate them into varieties to address the needs of local growers.
Wild Bio Co-Founder and CEO Dr Ross Hendron said: “Wheat is Britain’s biggest crop and feeds a fifth of humanity. But on a changing planet, growing it is only getting harder. That’s the challenge we exist to meet. As a new independent seed business that brings breeding and gene editing together, we can focus on the traits that growers genuinely need and design towards them with precision.
“Pairing F1 Seeds’ strengths with our evolutionary platform gives us the full stack of capabilities we need to develop the varieties that will bend the yield curve upwards again.”
F1 Seed already has six wheat varieties on the UK market, primarily focused on animal feed and distilling, with three more launching this year. Of the 82 new wheat varieties entering official UK national trials this year, 12% (10 entries) come directly from F1 Seed’s pipeline.
F1 Seed founder Bill Angus added: “This is the most exciting news for wheat growers since Cambridge University established the Plant Breeding Institute in 1912. Now over a century later, armed with an array of novel traits, we are well placed to move wheat breeding into a new and exciting era. Deploying traits has been the lifeblood of wheat breeding – now we have the opportunity to accelerate this in UK germplasm.”
