A co-created newsletter of resources and actions for climate biotech
Hello Climate Biotech Friends!
This is the last winter issue, so … hooray? We’ll admit that another Boston winter without snow feels strange: Call us crazy for preferring snow over mud, and we’re as lit up as ever to help biotechnology get into the efforts for planetary health.
Some updates from Homeworld Collective:
Importantly – we are building the Climate Biotech Community Jobs Board!
Fill out this form to show initial interest. This free platform will launch in March – we appreciate any questions or comments now as it’ll be useful to us as we publish this service to the community.
Why build a jobs board? We’ve observed a lot of activity in the climate biotech community for both seeking and sharing jobs. So we surveyed best practices and decided to use Consider.com’s platform (see examples at USV and SOSV)). As a non-profit that supports the growth of climate biotech, it’s our mandate to build the connective tissue across climate biotech. What this means for you if you’re a company with jobs, or a person seeking a job, you can start the process here.
In a few weeks, you can see the Homeworld Team on stage at SXSW, and Novo Nordisk’s Automated Scientist.
Also, we co-hosted an SF Bay Area social with ARPA-E’s Steve Singer and Ben Weiner while they visited from DC.
As our public platform develops, it’s important for us to be discovering and boosting great voices and efforts in the community. So we ask you: Who should we meet with?
With love and action-oriented optimism,
The Homeworld Team
Jobs, Funding, & Opportunities
Funding ($ looking for projects)
- Bezos Earth Fund offering $1M in prizes for CDR solutions that can hit 10gt/yr by 2050, with up to $50k per team. Also – shoutout to the Experiment.com team for continuing to host incredible opportunities on their platform!
- DOE offering $100M for pilots and testbeds towards multiple CDR pathways (h/t Max Schubert)
- NSF announcement for funding in Use-Inspired Acceleration of Protein Design for applications in the bioeconomy! Preliminary proposal due April 23, 2024 (h/t Tom Kalil)
- Silverstrand Capital launched a Biodiversity Accelerator with $200K of non-equity assistance and targeted mentoring. Applications close on 31st March.
- Not an award, just cool: ARPA-E announced awardees exploring Production of Geologic Hydrogen Through Stimulated Mineralogical Processes, including a few biological projects. Here’s a description of each awarded project.
- Bonus: For everybody into metascience: A comprehensive syllabus of the ARPA model and family tree.
Opportunities
- Good Food Institute offering SME mentors in alternative proteins (h/t George Tong)
- The Venture Science Doctorate (VSD) at Deep Science Ventures is the world’s first venture PhD program designed to transform high-potentials into high-impact science founders. They just released a mini-documentary describing it!
- Have an idea to turn into an actionable policy memo? Use <100 words to submit science policy ideas to FAS. (h/t Monica Cesinger)
Job postings
- Research Fellow at Good Food Institute – applications close 3/24
- Head of Business Development at Pow.Bio
- Postdoc/staff scientist in Yeh lab at Stanford: “Engineering nitrogen-fixing endosymbioses for sustainable agriculture” – Send CV and a statement of interest (1-2 paragraphs) to ellenyeh@stanford.edu
- Navigation Fund is hiring a Program Manager to drive efforts toward under-explored areas in climate technology (OIF, OAE, SAI/SRM, ice shelf stabilization, etc.)
- Postdoc position at Heriot-Watt University doing TEAs for two GHG mitigation projects. Bonus is you get to work with Mijnjdert Van der Spek, a project lead in our Garden Grants cohort!
Research & News
Technical resources
- Paper discussing the capabilities, challenges, and trends in ML and functional protein design (h/t Pascal Notin)
- Molecular Inventory resource: fermentation results centralized by ImpactDB
- Progress on “yamanaka for plants” to enable plant tissue differentiation (h/t Max Schubert)
- Preprint reporting a combination of two-enzyme system and enzyme engineering improved the activity of a new PET hydrolase identified from soil bacterial genome
- Some successful results with the use geminiviruses in genome editing and gene targeting in plants (h/t Derin Fasipe)
- Chloroplast gene targeting effort using a species of Gram-negative bacteria (h/t Derin Fasipe)
- Review on genome engineering in plant chloroplasts and mitochondria(h/t Vivian Zhong)
- Spreadsheet of the latest synbio research by Niko McCarty
Innovations and Developments
- “Meat rice” – rice as a scaffold for cultured meat. (h/t Jason B Thomas)
- A simple approach for enabling easier validation of an LLM’s output via symbolically grounded generation (SymGen)
- Insight into a platform that can follow the movement of individual proteins inside millions of cells in a single day
- Researchers have discovered a massive spring of hydrogen in Albania
- China has approved dozens of genetically modified corn and soybean seed varieties for planting, a move that could eventually boost production and reduce dependence on foreign supplies.
- Great report “Breaking the Cost Barriers of Biomanufacturing” by Synonym and BCG.
Climate Impact Studies
- The Roads to Removal report examines regional opportunities and considerations for CDR and evaluates the cost and potential capacity for conducting CDR in the US (h/t Nazish Jeffery)
- Bioresources Report from Energy Transitions Commission explores how not all biomass is ‘good’ biomass within a net-zero emissions economy (an oldie but a goodie) (h/t Meera Atreya)
- Sustainable Biomass Sourcing for Carbon Removal from Carbon Direct: a look at increased biomass-based CDR demand and practical guidance for sustainable sourcing of biomass
- The U.S. government should incorporate sustainability into the U.S. bioeconomy article from the Federation of American Scientists (h/t Nazish Jeffery)
Research Advances and Methodologies
- Recordings of the USDA Ag Outlook conference: “Cultivating the Future” included speakers and topics spanning the agricultural industry, from climate-smart agriculture to Indigenous food practices to innovative farming practices and more (h/t Vivian Zhong)
- A self-supervised model for tandem mass spectrometry applications out of MatterWork
Podcasts
- EBRC In Translation: conversations with leaders in the world of Engineering Biology (h/t Andrew Hunt)
Upcoming Events
- Conference: Ferment – Ginkgo Biowork’s annual conference in Boston, 4/11/2024
- Hello Tomorrow Global Summit in Paris on 3/21-22 (h/t Lucy Wlodarczyk-Gruber)
- Panel: Against the Clock: Building Community in Climate Biotech – SXSW conference, Austin, Texas 3/14/2024
- Conference: The Automated Scientist – the future of cell factory engineering 3/11 – 3/15 Hillerød, Denmark
Inspiration – Motivation through art and beauty
- Purple tomatoes are having a big moment (also you can buy seeds for the coming gardening season!) (h/t Eric Ward)
- NASA’s visualization of a gigaton (spoiler alert: whoa)
- Photos of isolated Armillaria gallica (aka honey mushrooms), a species of fungi that are known to form mycelial networks that can spread for miles and survive for centuries (h/t Josh McGinnis)
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