Cytotrait Raises £3M to Advance Plant Gene-Editing Platform

Cytotrait, a spinout from The University of Manchester, has closed a £3 million seed round to commercialise its platform for plant organelle gene editing. The financing was led by Northern Gritstone and included the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (UKI2S) and the Northern Universities Ventures Fund.

The company’s proprietary technology, MOSS (Mutant Organelle Selection System), is designed to introduce targeted gene edits and transgenes into plant organelles such as chloroplasts and mitochondria. By enabling rapid achievement of homoplasmy — where the desired change is present across all organelles in a cell — MOSS aims to overcome longstanding technical hurdles in plant engineering.

Cytotrait says the platform can be applied to both endogenous gene edits and the insertion of new genetic material, offering a route to traits that could boost yields, improve resistance to pests and diseases, and support hybrid crop development. The startup also highlights potential uses in creating new food-related traits and enhancing carbon sequestration in agricultural systems.

Dr Junwei Ji, co-founder and executive director of Cytotrait, framed MOSS as a tool to help address food security and agricultural sustainability challenges. He noted that the approach may streamline certain technical and regulatory pathways by focusing edits within organelles rather than the nuclear genome.

With the new funding, Cytotrait plans to expand research programmes across European and North American markets, concentrating on wheat, maize, potato and canola. The company will use the capital to validate trait concepts and advance collaborations with plant scientists and breeders.

For readers watching the agri‑biotech space, Cytotrait’s round signals continued investor interest in precision crop technologies that promise both productivity gains and sustainability benefits. Whether MOSS will deliver at scale remains to be seen, but the startup is positioning itself at the intersection of genetic engineering and practical crop improvement.