Ceres Inc. (NASDAQ: CERE) showed signs of life in the market on Tuesday regarding a recent licensing agreement. The company announced that KWS SAAT SE, a global seed developer with operations in over 70 counties, will evaluate Ceres’ Persephone bioinformatics technology under a license agreement.

For some background on the Persephone system, it allows researchers to organize, store, access and explore a diverse array of DNA-related information in much the same way online mapping programs allow users to explore geographic regions and locations.

This technology is not just limited to crop research. Ceres markets Persephone to companies and institutions in the human and biomedical fields, where DNA-related information is analyzed and used in a similar manner to plants. The Persephone platform can be installed either within a customer’s own IT infrastructure or in the cloud using Amazon Web Services.

Dr. Andreas Menze, Head of Bioinformatics at KWS, noted:

We plan to evaluate how Persephone can help disseminate data for the widest audience within KWS for discussion and discovery. We believe that broad accessibility to data will be a key driver of long-term novel discovery.

So far in 2015 Ceres has taken a beating, the stock is down 48% year to date, while it is down 70% in just the past 52-weeks. Just looking at the chart, it looks like the stock has been on a race to zero since its IPO back in 2012.

Shares of Ceres were up 27% at $1.27 on Tuesday afternoon. The stock has a consensus analyst price target of $4.00 and a 52-week trading range of $0.90 to $43.27.

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