The Climate Biotech Podcast

On this episode of The Climate Biotech Podcast, Paul Reginato is joined by Robbie Wilson, a research scientist in the Department of Chemistry at MIT, where he leads the RuBisCO engineering effort in Matt Shoulders' lab. Robbie has spent his career working on RuBisCO – the enzyme that fixes CO2 –across labs in Australia, Germany, and the United States. He co-leads the Enhanced Photosynthesis in Crops (EPiC) Project, which applies directed evolution to RuBisCO with the goal of moving improved variants from the lab into field-relevant crops.RuBisCO is present in all autotrophic organisms, including plants, where it catalyzes the conversion of CO2 into molecules that can be used throughout metabolism.  Almost every carbon atom in your body passed through it at some point. It is also famously slow, and the version inside plants is so structurally fragile it needs a dedicated team of helper proteins just to fold correctly. During his postdoc in Germany, Robbie and a colleague figured out exactly which helpers were needed, making it possible for the first time to grow and engineer plant RuBisCO inside ordinary lab bacteria. That unlocked the door to testing thousands of variants quickly.Robbie's work also points to why a faster RuBisCO is not necessarily a better one. The fastest versions found in nature live in places like hydrothermal vents where CO2 is abundant, and they perform poorly inside a leaf where CO2 is scarce. The more useful questions are about CO2 affinity, the trade-off between activity and stability that keeps the enzyme from being pushed too far, and oxygen interference. Oxygen interference is when RuBisCO mistakenly catalyzes a reaction with oxygen instead of CO2, an inefficiency which wastes the plant's energy and gets worse as temperatures climb. Reducing that oxygen sensitivity is a central focus of MIT’s EPiC Project, and is a high-leverage opportunity to protect crop yields in a warming world.Listen to learn why heat waves are increasingly dangerous for staple crops like wheat, how machine learning is reshaping the way RuBisCO engineers choose which mutations to test, and what stands between today's lab results and a real improvement in the field. Send us Fan Mail

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.Send us Fan Mail

On this episode of The Climate Biotech Podcast, Paul Reginato is joined by Kiara Reyes Gamas, environmental synthetic biologist and non-resident postdoctoral scholar at Rice University's Baker Institute. Alongside her bench science, she has consistently engaged with the social and governance dimensions of synthetic biology, which shapes how she thinks about engineering microbes for environmental release.Much of Kiara’s work has focused on horizontal gene transfer, the process by which microbes naturally swap DNA throughout the environment. It is how antibiotic resistance spreads, and it is one of the central reasons regulators worry about releasing engineered microbes. The problem is that we have very poor measurements of how often it actually happens in natural settings in complex communities, or which organisms participate. Kiara’s research also suggests that the field's default toward biocontainment may be missing the point for environmental applications. A microbe engineered to clean up an oil spill has to interact with the environment to do its job. The more useful questions are about which genes are safe to introduce, how engineered organisms behave under selective pressure in microbial communties, how to integrate human communities into the governance of these technologies, and whether the regulatory scrutiny applied to recombinant DNA should extend to any non-native microbe being released. Listen to learn how RNA-based barcoding extends the reach of horizontal gene transfer measurements across microbial species, what ecology has to teach synthetic biologists about environmental release, and why Kiara argues that community co-design is an engineering requirement rather than a regulatory checkbox. Send us Fan Mail