Working Weeds.

Herbicide chemistry may not sound particularly inspiring. But in 1995, when Richard N. Trethewey heard a talk on how herbicides affect the metabolism of barley, he was struck by an idea. In 1998 the team founded the Berlin-based firm Metanomics ("metabolism" combined with "genomics"), which aims to identify key plant metabolism genes--for instance, those that allow plants to tolerate cold or generate extra oil--and then license its novel plant collection and genomics database to breeders and biotech firms. Richard A. Dixon, director of plant biology at the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Ardmore, Okla. Although other bioinformatics companies exist, Metanomics joins North Carolina-based Paradigm Genetics in an elite group of businesses that do both extensive plant metabolism experiments and software development.