On this episode of The Climate Biotech Podcast, we are joined by Henry Lee, CEO of Cultivarium, a Focused Research Organization (FRO) that accelerates the engineering of non-model organisms. 

Henry came to biotechnology through electrical engineering, after a chance opportunity to dissect crayfish neurons inspired a passion for using engineering to understand biology while using biology to engineer. During his postdoc in George Church's lab, he pursued what he calls "bucket list science." For one of his projects, he developed new methods to culture and engineer the bacterium Vibrio natriegens, which is one of the fastest-growing organisms ever described and grows roughly twice as quickly as E. coli. That work shaped Cultivarium's approach to the broader problem of non-model organisms. 

Henry believes that the mental model of applied biology has traditionally been far too one-to-one, focusing on a single organism for a single application: “If you’re interested in plastic degradation, well have you heard of this one microbe that does plastic degradation?” In reality, most useful capabilities are shared amongst many organisms, and we would ideally draw on that full diversity to develop solutions. Cultivarium is developing tools to make it easier to work with diverse organisms to find what works best for a particular goal. 

Listen to learn how Cultivarium is changing the way researchers approach engineering non-model organisms.

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