Cytotrait Raises £3M to Apply Its Organelle-Targeting MOSS Platform to Wheat, Maize, Potato and Canola

March 9, 2026

Cytotrait, the Manchester-based agricultural biotechnology company, raised £3 million in a seed funding round in March 2026, led by Northern Gritstone, with participation from the UK Innovation and Science Seed Fund (UKI2S) and the Northern Universities Ventures Fund. The funding will enable Cytotrait to launch research programmes targeting wheat, maize, potato, and canola in European and North American markets, exploring applications including improved yield and resilience, new food traits, and enhanced carbon sequestration. Cytotrait is a spinout from the University of Manchester, supported through the University of Manchester Innovation Factory, and recently completed Northern Gritstone’s NG Studios venture-building programme for deeptech spinouts. The company was co-founded by Dr Junwei Ji and Anil Day, alongside Executive Chair Tim Brears. It previously received £498,000 from the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) to develop MOSS for hybrid seed production in wheat.

Feeding a growing global population while reducing agriculture’s environmental footprint is one of the defining scientific and industrial challenges of the century. Crop improvement through genetic engineering has delivered significant advances in yield, pest resistance, and drought tolerance, but the dominant approach — modifying genes in the nuclear genome — has practical limitations. Nuclear transgenes are subject to silencing, variable expression levels, and complex regulatory pathways that differ by jurisdiction and by the nature of the modification. The introduction of multiple traits simultaneously (trait stacking) is technically difficult. And traits introduced via the nuclear genome can spread to related wild plant species through pollen, raising biosafety and regulatory concerns that add cost and time to commercialisation.

Cytotrait’s MOSS (Mutant Organelle Selection System) platform addresses these limitations by targeting chloroplasts and mitochondria rather than the nuclear genome. These organelles are present in every plant cell in large numbers, and because they are inherited maternally rather than through pollen, genetic modifications introduced into organelles cannot spread to wild relatives via cross-pollination — providing built-in containment that simplifies the regulatory pathway significantly. MOSS rapidly achieves homoplasmy, meaning the desired genetic change is present in every copy of the targeted organelle throughout the plant, ensuring consistent and predictable trait expression at high levels. The result is a platform that can engineer crop characteristics with the precision, expression level, and regulatory simplicity that conventional nuclear engineering cannot match.

UKI2S investor Hassan Mahmudul described MOSS as a breakthrough that can unlock high-value trait expression at levels significantly beyond what is achievable through conventional nuclear genome engineering. Northern Gritstone CEO Duncan Johnson characterised Cytotrait as a prime example of world-class innovation from the North of England’s universities, noting the combination of scientific strength and a clear route to commercial impact. The initial focus on wheat, maize, potato, and canola reflects both the global significance of these crops — they collectively account for the majority of global caloric supply — and the specific areas where MOSS’s traits (improved yield, resilience, carbon sequestration) have the greatest potential market value. The Precision Breeding Act in the UK has opened a more favourable regulatory environment for gene-edited and engineered crop traits, creating a window for companies like Cytotrait to progress programmes that would have faced longer timelines under prior EU-derived frameworks.

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