Novin Agritech Receives USDA Grant to Develop Novel Traits for Wheat, Accelerate Trait Integration

Novin AgriTech, a startup whose platform combines agricultural expertise and biotechnology to develop novel traits for cereal crops, has received an eight-month, $174,906 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Mohsen Mohammadi, co-founder of Novin AgriTech, is the wheat breeder and an associate professor of plant breeding and genetics in Purdue University’s Department of Agronomy in the College of Agriculture. He leads Purdue’s soft red winter wheat breeding program, with research focused on improving grain yield, enhancing resistance to Fusarium head blight and dissecting the genetics of sustainability traits.

Mohammadi developed two patented cereal transformation platforms: InPACT, Novin AgriTech’s core platform, and a nanoparticle-assisted ultrasound gene delivery system. They enable direct genetic manipulation of elite wheat germplasm. He and his colleagues will use the SBIR funding to develop the nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) trait and introduce it into elite wheat cultivars.

“The project will reinforce Novin AgriTech’s positioning as a platform company,” he said. “Our mission is to empower the cereal crop ecosystem with practical, scalable and future-ready solutions that tackle the evolving challenges of food security, health, resource efficiency, and crop resilience to biotic and abiotic stresses.”