b'Can Seed Fraud Be Eliminated?Canadas Index Biosystems believes they can eradicate seed fraud with its technology.Marc ZienkiewiczTRADITIONALLY, SEED COMPANIESrely on their pack-aging for traceability. The bag identifies the seed. Problem is, once that seed comes out of the bag, that valuable product is now open to theft and fraud. After all, you cant put a barcode on each tiny seed to identify what it is or where it came from.Or can you? Enter Canadas Index Biosystems (Index) and its BioTags technologymicroscopic fingerprints made from bak-ers yeast that can be applied to seed to prove its identity. Their mission is to use biotechnology to imprint identity onto products, enabling brands to deliver a more secure and sustainable future.Company CEO Michael Borg is a two-time startup founder and two-time first technical hire, leading to one IPO and two acquisitions. As an entrepreneur and software/data engineer, he identified the opportunity to link a physical product to its digital supply chain and now leads Indexs vision to leverage biology for improved supply chain traceability.Prior to founding the Toronto-based Index, he worked at a licensed producer of medical cannabis and spent a lot of his time there writing software for seed-to-sale traceability.To satisfy regulations, we needed to be able to trace a batch of cannabis to a particular patient within seconds, and part of the challenge was that batches and various cultivars of cannabis were occasionally blended, and sometimes transformed into extracts, he says.It was there he met fellow Index co-founder Jeremy Friedberg, who introduced him to DNA barcoding for various cannabis cultivars.Using that technology, you could differentiate these can-nabis cultivars based on their DNA, just like you can differentiate humans based on their DNA. As a software engineer who did a lot of tinkering in code, it was fascinating to me. Thats when BioTags were born.Instead of relying on a products existing DNA barcodes, Index leverages yeast as a scalable alternative to biological identification. The company incorporated in 2019 and since then has made sub-40/ SEEDWORLD.COMJUNE 2022'