A co-created newsletter of resources and actions for climate biotech
Hello Climate Biotech Friends!
Next month, our newsletter will feature the reflections and well-wishes from our community! Click here to contribute your thoughts, we would love to include you.
We’ve been quieter than usual as we’ve been working through all the amazing applications and ideas shared by the community. They are:
- The Ideas Writing Challenge: 150 submissions of really beautiful quality. According to the survey, 50% of these pieces wouldn’t have been written otherwise. We will be announcing winners soon!
- The Ideas Matter Fellowship: We believe writing is a tool for self-advocacy and idea generation. We received 500 submissions, and will soon launch public content to support people becoming better writers.
- The Homeworld Garden Grants: We received 65 amazing submissions, adding to a total of $5.5M of ambitious projects using protein engineering toward a healthier planet. If you are a philanthropy, we received far more quality projects than our $1M could support, so please reach out to Dan (daniel@homeworld.bio) if you’re interested to learn more.
As we reflect on November, we’re excited to see an increasing connection between community-sourced ideas and funding. If you work on an idea area that you think needs more community attention, reach out to us with suggested problems!
With love and action-oriented optimism,
The Homeworld Team
(PS: Say hey to Dan if you’re at the ASCB Annual Meeting in Boston!)
Jobs, Funding, & Opportunities
Funding ($ looking for projects)
- ARPA-E opened up a flexible $10M funding opportunity, up to $500k (link)
Funding (Projects looking for $)
- There are 65 amazing projects as part of the Garden Grants first call, looking to use protein engineering toward sustainability goals. Reach out to Dan Goodwin at Homeworld Collective (daniel@homeworld.bio) to learn more about funding particular projects.
Opportunities
- ARPA-E request for information for reducing GHG emissions from nitrogen in agriculture (link) (h/t Chris Eiben)
- Deep Science Ventures is accepting applications for their 2nd cohort of their Venture Science Doctorate (VSD).
Job postings
- The Abudayyeh-Gootenberg Lab (abugootlab.org) will be having an open house for prospective rotation students on November 20th from 5:30-7pm.
- CowBell Labs (led by CEO Doc Brown) is hiring two roles (Director of Engineering and VP Partnerships and Operations ) for their executive leadership team.
- The Navigation Fund, a new foundation funded by Jed McCaleb, is looking for a founding Climate Program Officer. (h/t Andrew Cantino)
- Quadrature Climate Foundation is hiring a Science Lead (h/t Madeleine Luck)
- Pasture Biosciences is hiring an SF-based scientist with experience in mRNA using in vitro transcription methods.
- Cornell has several opportunities:
- Biological and Environmental Engineering Department is recruiting a new faculty member to work on solutions in the sustainable energy transition (h/t Buz Barstow)
- Cornell is also hiring 27 cohort members in the next three years through their Transdisciplinary Moonshot Hiring Initiative. (h/t Buz Barstow)
Research & News
Technical Resources
- Carbon Direct guide to biomass sourcing for CDR.
- Researchers from UCSD have developed a living material they think could be the key to using laccase to clean up polluted water (h/t Eirini Malliaraki)
- (Not new but interesting) Energy Transitions Land Use Report from 2021 (h/t Chris Eiben, h/t Meery Atreya)
- Refactoring the genetic code to make microbes that can’t do horizontal gene transfer (h/t Chris Eiben)
- The first Cellular Agriculture Textbook was just published (h/t Isha Datar)
- Discussion on Twitter/X about Generate Bio’s Chroma tool, and the corresponding paper about their generative model of proteins.
- Accurate prediction of protein–nucleic acid complexes using RoseTTAFoldNA, and computational design of sequence-specific DNA-binding proteins.
- Evaluation of GPT’s capability in science (h/t Eirini Malliaraki)
- Graphite supply: Sustainable conversion of biomass to rationally designed lithium-ion battery graphite, addressing the anticipated graphite supply shortages that will impact EV batteries.
- Paper about marine diatoms for industrial carbon management (h/t Michael Silverstein).
- Don’t know enough about this but does this imply the whole sink seaweed to the bottom of the ocean for CDR won’t have the impact we had hoped? (Nature, h/t Arjun Kakhar)
- An autonomous laboratory for the accelerated synthesis of novel materials (Nature, Deep Mind Blog, h/t Ariane Mora)
- The SoltDB Biotech Company Database, “Let’s track the bioeconomy together.” (living.tech),
- The oxygen-tolerant reductive glycine pathway assimilates methanol, formate and CO2 in the yeast Komagataella phaffii (Nature Communications)
- The Watabe Lab in Japan has some fascinating work exploring biogenic polyamines for carbonate formation and Rubisco activity (Marine Biotechnology , Scientific Reports, h/t Derin Fasipe)
- Cultivating alternative proteins from commodity crop sidestreams (Good Food Institute, h/t Brian Quoc Le)
Climate Impact Studies
- Cellular Agriculture is now a minor degree option at Tufts. Shoutout to Isha Datar and New Harvest for essentially inventing this term a decade ago.
- First all-SAF flight completed on November 28 (Reuters) (h/t Jesse Lou)
- EMBL has some cool projects to boost: Molecules to Ecosystems
Blog posts
- Derek Lowe’s “Things I won’t work with: FOOF” is an all-time great post about chemistry, always worth the fun read.
- We are now in the “appification of AI” era. Here’s a relevant one for us, whole papers can be ingested (rather than chunks at a time)
- On the importance of “scenius,” and how we might create it – Packy McCormick.
- A blogpost idea: It is poetic that life on Earth start in alkaline hydrothermal vents.
Inspiration – Motivation through art and beauty
- Nick Lane’s “The Vital Question” led us to read this article on Peter Mitchell and his uphill battle in the “Ox Phos” wars.
- Animals quickly adapting to climate change on this Good Together podcast.
- Alex Rosay’s podcast episode about cell-free enzyme engineering on Grow Everything.
We believe in the power of our community, and our newsletter aims to showcase this. So many people are doing amazing work towards climate, sustainability, and planetary health. Thank you to everyone who submitted the ideas and inspirations which created this issue.
If you have any feedback, insight, or just want to say hello, please connect with us!
hello@homeworld.bio
@HomeworldBio
By The Homeworld Team