Plantae has been set up to develop solutions essential in the near term for the global food and drink industry. The company will also create products to transform global nutrition and environmental security.

A team of PhD professionals from the Weizmann Institute of Science will take part in the project. They are professors Asaph Aharoni, Sarel J Fleishman, Avraham Levy, and Dan Tawfik.

Sam Salman, chairman and chief executive of Impact NRS, said: “We are deeply honoured to partner with professors Aharoni, Fleishman, Levy and Tawfik to cultivate an empowering innovation environment based on their extraordinary talents, broad capabilities and insights.”

Salman argued that plants are the true convergence point of food, health and environmental technologies. “With this exceptional team from the Weizmann Institute as well as NRS’s existing platforms and teams in Israel and North America, we are uniquely positioned to realise profound innovations that we hope to bring commercial success while measurably contributing to humanity and the planet.”

The Weizmann Institute of Science has been ranked eighth globally for research quality in a weighted ranking conducted by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University in the Netherlands. In the sub-ranking for Life and Earth Sciences, the Weizmann Institute of Science was ranked fourth in the world.

“We are very happy to establish this cooperation with NRS,” said Dr Opher Shapira, chief executive of Yeda. “The area of food technologies is growing, and we are pleased to be part of this growth.”

The teams from the Weizmann Institute of Science is at the forefront of the foundational science for plant research and biotechnology in fields.

Its expertise includes synthetic and complex systems biology that spans primary and specialised metabolites, genetics, genomics and gene-editing, evolution and design of proteins and enzymes.