Show Notes
Plasmidsaurus took plasmid sequencing from $600 to $15 and turned a "boring" service company idea into a hugely successful company serving 70,000+ scientists. In this episode, CEO Mark Budde and Niko McCarty get into the bigger question: what does it take for companies to automate and scale wet-lab biology methods in the same way that Plasmidsaurus did for sequencing? They cover the early Oxford Nanopore bet, the obsession with speed, and why Mark won’t sell customer data to AI labs. This podcast is made possible by Astera Institute.
More from The New Biology
Nick Desnoyer, a plant biologist in Norwich, England, is designing and creating flowers that don’t exist anywhere in nature. In this interview, he reveals his next project: Paintunia, a petunia that acts as a living canvas. These petunias have an inducible gene; when you lightly touch a bud (before it opens) with a clear molecule, called dexamethasone, that molecules seeps into cells, switches on the gene, and causes them to make a pigment. The result is a paintable flower, where molecules are literally used to control which colors show up in which places. For a prior project, Nick turned Arabidopsis, a small (and quite ugly) plant widely used in research, into little pink “micro-roses.”
Pioneer Labs, a nonprofit research group, has engineered a microbe that eats Martian dirt and excretes bioplastic. It is the first step of their "five organism" plan to terraform Mars and make the planet habitable. This interview is with Erika DeBenedictis, the co-founder and CEO of Pioneer Labs. Subscribe to Asimov Press: https://press.asimov.com 0:00 A first microbe engineered for Mars 5:03 Simulating Martian chemistry 8:27 The five "pioneer species" 17:20 Water, warming, and nitrogen 26:39 Radiation, growth rates, and poor measurements 35:49 Starship 41:05 Why create a second biosphere?
Chemists at the University of Minnesota, led by Kate Adamala, recently built a synthetic cell that eats, grows, and divides; purely by putting together molecules in the laboratory. Their creation, called SpudCell, can only divide for five generations. What will it take to make it grow for longer? And why bother making a synthetic cell in the first place? Subscribe to Asimov Press: https://press.asimov.com Chapters: 00:00 SpudCell is not alive 05:16 How SpudCell was made 13:14 How to make a continuously replicating cell 29:48 Finding new mechanisms for cell division 40:38 What is the point of SpudCell? 54:51 Mirror life, and whether SpudCell uniquely enables it 1:14:38 Biotic, China, and 2050
A dairy cow is worth $1,000 to $2,000 to a farmer, whereas a broiler chicken, raised for meat, generates just $4 of profit. Quantifying animals this way may feel uncomfortable, but those $4 are all a farmer can spend to keep a chicken healthy. And this places some really interesting constraints on how biotechnology must be scaled (in terms of vaccines and other interventions) in the animal welfare space.
Scientists have studied bacteria under microscopes for 400 years. But Yonatan Chemla, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, has developed a technology that lets us see microbes from a drone 100 meters in the air. In this episode, we discuss the emerging field of "hyperspectral biology," which uses hyperspectral cameras (first built by NASA in the 1980s) to detect molecules with unique light-absorption signatures. With this technology, you could engineer a microbe to sense a landmine, for example, and release a pigment in response. A drone could then spot that pigment from hundreds of meters away. By spraying other types of engineered microbes over a field, they could map heavy metals, report on soil health, or find gold deposits. But almost none of this can happen in the United States. The EPA regulates engineered microbes as chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act, a 1976 law that never mentions biology, and the agency seems to have approved just one product through it. As a result, many of biotechnology's most useful ideas — microbes that break down plastic, sense landmines, or remove pollution from water — never leave the laboratory. Chapters: [00:00:00] Introduction [00:04:08] Applications for hyperspectral biology [00:07:33] How to build a biosensor [00:13:00] Molecular absorption data [00:22:12] How hyperspectral cameras work [00:38:15] Spatial resolution and satellite monitoring [00:51:04] Regulations around environmental release [01:08:44] Risk vs progress Further Reading: Summary of the Toxic Substances Control Act, EPA: https://www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/summary-toxic-substances-control-act Design and regulation of engineered bacteria for environmental release, Nature Microbiology: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-024-01918-0 Hyperspectral reporters for long-distance and wide-area detection of gene expression in living bacteria, Nature Biotechnology: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-025-02622-y Seeing microbes from the sky, Asimov Press: https://press.asimov.com/articles/hyperspectral