13 January 2010: Kernel Capital, has today confirmed Investee Company Stokes Bio Limited, has signed a major licensing and R&D collaboration with one of the world’s leading agriculture companies, Monsanto Company (NYSE:MON). This significant global win for Irish life sciences research is expected to help accelerate the pace of new advancement in plant breeding.

Commenting on the announcement, Bob Reiter, vice president of breeding technology for Monsanto said: "We are constantly looking for opportunities to collaborate with other companies and adopt new technologies that could help speed up the rate of scientific discovery."

Stokes Bio was established in 2005 by Professor Mark Davies and Dr. Tara Dalton as a spin-off company from the Stokes Institute at the University of Limerick financed through the Bank of Ireland Kernel Capital Fund which has a 35% shareholding in the Company.

"The recent significant licensing and R&D collaboration agreement between Stokes Bio Limited and Monsanto, the largest agricultural company in the world, is excellent validation of Stokes Bio’s core platform instruments under development and we believe it will revolutionize gene expression profiling in the future," said Dr. Daniel O’ Mahony, Partner at Kernel Capital, "The patented genotyping instruments will bring all of the various stages of gene analysis into a single process. The new system will allow companies and scientists to massively increase the quantity and speed of data processed in the course of genetic analysis of biological samples."

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For further information please contact:

Orla Rimmington, Operations Manager, Kernel Capital.
Tel: +353 21 4928974 / Fax: +353 21 4928977