By Michael Snyder

The company that created Moderna has now created a new company called Terrana that has developed an RNA technology for plants that is unlike anything we have seen before. This new technology uses RNA from plant viruses as a platform to transport “other pieces of cargo RNA into a plant” for various purposes such as fighting off diseases or killing insects. One of the co-founders of Terrana has publicly stated that this new technology is “similar” to “RNA technology that we pioneered in human health”. As you will see below, once the RNA from this new technology enters a plant, it replicates. The goal is to get farmers all over the world to use this new product, and needless to say that could have huge implications. I realize that all of this is a lot to wrap your mind around, and so I will take it one step at a time.

Flagship Pioneering is the parent company that created Moderna, and now Flagship Pioneering has also created Terrana. So Moderna and Terrana are very closely related to one another…

The saying in real estate is location, location, location. And that applies for technology being unveiling by Terrana Biosciences.

Emerging from stealth mode after four years of development, this Flagship Pioneering company is taking the RNA expertise of cousin company Moderna, and creating crop protection solutions in parallel but distinctly different than cousin company Indigo Ag.

“Terrana is coming out of the Flagship Pioneering ecosystem in Boston, and Flagship has a long history of working on RNA,” Ryan Rapp Terrana Biosciences co-founder and CEO. “Probably the best known RNA company is Moderna, but we have a whole host of other ones within the ecosystem, and it’s helped allow us to have all this knowledge about RNA, but apply it to solve problems in agriculture.”

Terrana is rolling out a new technology that uses “RNA from benign plant viruses” to deliver pieces of cargo RNA into a plant…

With a $50 million initial investment from Flagship, Terrana will use RNA from benign plant viruses as a chassis to carry other pieces of cargo RNA into a plant to help it respond to threats like viruses, fungi, and insects.

I haven’t been able to find anything about how much testing has been done on this new product to determine whether it is safe or not.

Once farmers spray this new product on to their crops, the RNA enters the plants through “tiny tears in the leaves”…

After the product is sprayed onto crops, the RNA chassis enters the plant through tiny tears in the leaves and delivers the RNA cargo to plant cells. The cargo could act on its own to stimulate a plant’s immune response and fight off viruses, or it could be translated into proteins that help the plant, such as Cry proteins, which kill insects when the insects chomp on a plant.

If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, that is because it is similar to technology that Moderna developed.

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