On the most recent episode of the Climate Biotech Podcast, we are joined by Ginger Krieg Dosier, an architect-turned-biotech entrepreneur who created biocement at Biomason and is now building BIOME Consortia to accelerate biology's transition from thousands to billions of applications. Ginger's journey from NASA kid in Alabama to founding one of climate biotech's earliest companies reveals how architectural thinking translates surprisingly well to biological innovation. 

Ginger’s approach at Biomasontackled concrete, the second most consumed substance on Earth after water. By using microbes to precipitate calcium carbonate at ambient temperature instead of firing kilns at 1500°C, they cut both emissions and energy usage dramatically. 

The pivot to BIOME emerged from a startling statistic: with an estimated one trillion microbial species on Earth and only 0.001% discovered, Ginger saw that the strain bank they'd built for biocement applications represented something far bigger. Today, fewer than 800 strains power all commercial applications - she believes we need billions by 2050.

BIOME’s two flagship initiatives address this gap. Atlas creates a digital microbial commons focused on access and interpretability, gamifying discovery and translation to engage more tinkerers. Arc tackles preservation, particularly of threatened environments like glaciers that lose tens of quadrillions of microbes to sea annually, while moving beyond minus-80 storage limitations.

Listen to learn why consortia-based biology may solve the scaling economics that sank many biomanufacturing companies, how visualization of the invisible microbiome could transform public engagement, and why the "age of complexity" might finally deliver on the 1999 prediction that the 21st century would be biology's era.

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