02 October 2026, St. Louis: Bayer Crop Science has asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to clear two new genetically engineered cotton varieties for commercial use, one combining tolerance to five different herbicides and the other carrying three separate insect-resistance genes. The company’s petitions, filed with USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and published in the Federal Register on September 21, opened a 60-day public comment period running through November 20. If approved, the two cotton lines, named MON 96012 and MON 89151, would give U.S. and eventually global cotton growers new options for managing herbicide-resistant weeds and resistant insect pests in a single seed package.
Cotton growers already have access to Bayer’s existing XtendFlex trait, which combines tolerance to glyphosate, glufosinate and dicamba. MON 96012 would add tolerance to two additional herbicide classes on top of a similar base stack, giving growers extra chemistry options in fields where weeds have already evolved resistance to some of the older tools. Bayer’s current Bollgard cotton lines, meanwhile, rely on different combinations of Bt proteins (explained below); MON 89151’s specific three-protein combination appears designed to complement or eventually succeed those existing stacks as resistance management needs evolve.
Five-Way Herbicide Tolerance in One Plant
MON 96012 cotton has been engineered to tolerate five herbicide types: glyphosate, glufosinate, dicamba, and chemicals from two other herbicide classes known as HPPD-inhibiting and PPO-inhibiting herbicides, each of which disrupts a different biochemical process that weeds need to grow. By stacking tolerance to this many herbicide classes into one cotton variety, Bayer is giving growers more flexibility to rotate or combine chemistries in the same field, a strategy widely recommended by weed scientists to slow the spread of herbicide-resistant weeds such as Palmer amaranth and waterhemp, two of the most troublesome broadleaf weeds in U.S. cotton and soybean country. APHIS’s public filing does not disclose the specific genes used to confer each individual tolerance.
Triple-Stacked Insect Protection
The second variety, MON 89151, is engineered to produce three separate insecticidal proteins, called Vip3Cb1.1, Cry1Da_7 and Cry1B.3, inside the plant’s own tissue. These proteins occur naturally in the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, commonly known as Bt, and are toxic to certain insects when eaten but are considered safe for humans and most other organisms. Bayer’s filing says the cotton is designed to resist feeding damage from lepidopteran pests, the caterpillar-stage larvae of moths, including tobacco budworm, cotton bollworm, Old World bollworm, Australian bollworm, fall armyworm and soybean looper. Stacking three distinct Bt proteins, rather than one or two, is intended to reduce the chances that any single pest population develops resistance to all of them at once.
Both filings are petitions for what USDA calls nonregulated status, the formal process by which a genetically engineered crop is assessed for plant pest risk and, if cleared, allowed to be grown and sold without special biotech oversight under the Plant Protection Act. Public comments on both varieties can be submitted through regulations.gov, under docket numbers APHIS-2026-1387 for the herbicide-tolerant line and APHIS-2026-0859 for the insect-resistant line. APHIS has not indicated when it expects to issue a final determination, and the public petition notices do not include field trial efficacy data, which Bayer would have submitted as part of a separate, non-public petition package.
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