Oxford spinout buys wheat breeder in precision-breeding push

An Oxford University spinout has acquired an established wheat breeder in a deal aimed at creating an independent UK precision-breeding seed business.

Wild Bioscience, known as Wild Bio, has bought F1 Seed, combining its work in artificial intelligence, evolutionary biology and gene editing with an established British wheat-breeding programme.

The companies described the combined operation as Britain’s first independent precision-breeding wheat business. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The acquisition gives Wild Bio control over more stages of variety development, from identifying useful traits to breeding, field testing and commercial release.

F1 Seed brings more than a decade of breeding work, an established germplasm pipeline and several varieties already available to growers.

It currently has six wheat varieties on the UK market, mainly for animal feed and distilling, with a further three due to launch this year.

Of the 82 wheat varieties entering official UK national trials this year, 10 have come from F1 Seed’s breeding pipeline.

Wild Bio, meanwhile, uses plant biology data and artificial intelligence to identify traits linked to yield stability, disease resistance and resilience to difficult growing conditions.

The company studies how plants have evolved to cope with pressures such as drought, heat, flooding and disease, then uses those findings to identify potentially useful genetic changes.

Precision breeding can introduce targeted changes to plant DNA that could also occur naturally or through conventional breeding, but potentially much more quickly.

Wild Bio said the acquisition would allow promising traits to be moved into commercial breeding programmes more efficiently than either business could have achieved alone.

The combined company plans to focus on wheat varieties designed for British growing conditions.

The deal comes amid concern over stagnant yields, rising production costs and increasingly volatile weather.

Wild Bio said UK wheat yields had shown little long-term growth over the past 30 years.

It added that the exceptionally dry and hot springs of 2025 and 2026 had underlined the need for varieties capable of coping with heat, drought and other environmental pressures.

The company said wheat yields in 2025 were 13% below the 10-year average.

It also warned that some English wheat-growing regions could lose between 10% and 25% of their productive potential over the next two decades because of climate change.

These claims were presented by Wild Bio and were not independently assessed as part of the announcement.

The company said the financial pressure on growers was being intensified by narrow margins, difficult weather and the threat of crop disease.

It also warned that the UK wheat gene pool had narrowed over time, leaving more than half of domestic varieties vulnerable to yellow rust.

F1 Seed was established in part to increase genetic diversity and reduce the risk of widespread crop losses caused by disease.

The acquisition follows the introduction of England’s Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Regulations, which have been in force since November 2025.

The regulations created a route to market for targeted genetic changes that could also have arisen through traditional breeding.

However, the deal will not result in new varieties reaching farms immediately.

Any new wheat varieties will still need to undergo several years of breeding, field trials, assessment and approval before becoming commercially available.

Dr Ross Hendron, co-founder and chief executive of Wild Bio, said: “Wheat is Britain’s biggest crop and feeds a fifth of humanity. But on a changing planet, growing it is only getting harder.”

He said the acquisition would allow the company to combine gene editing with an established breeding pipeline and concentrate on traits growers most needed.

“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,” Hendron said.

Bill Angus, founder and director of F1 Seed, previously spent two decades leading what was then the UK’s largest wheat-breeding programme at Nickerson and Limagrain.

He described the deal as “the most exciting news for wheat growers since Cambridge University established the Plant Breeding Institute in 1912”.

Angus said the acquisition could help accelerate the introduction of new traits into British wheat germplasm.

“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,” he said.

Dr Stuart Harrison, chief business officer at Wild Bio, said the deal would turn the company from a trait discovery and licensing business into a seed company with control over trait discovery, breeding and commercial variety development.

The combined business will initially focus on traits linked to yield stability, yellow rust resistance and resilience to heat and drought, with any resulting varieties still subject to national trials and approval before release.