As I’ve said before, “Synbio will eat the world, and the world will eat synbio” One of my favourite synbio ag companies, Pivot Bio, demonstrates this perfectly. They’ve just raised USD430m Series D funding to scale their engineered nitrogen fixing microbes. They say its product “will allow corn growers to cut out 40 pounds of synthetic nitrogen use per acre.”
This is an enormous gain for agriculture and the planet by reducing nitrogen runoff and nitrous oxide emission. The infamous marine dead zones could one day be a thing of the past.
Chemistry has revolutionised human existence with the invention of things like plastics and synthetic nitrogen fertilisers. But they haven’t come without problems and will biology now be called upon to fix them?
Synthetic biology has the capacity to fundamentally change virtually every aspect of human life. Food and Ag are just two of these aspects, but perhaps the most crucial of all.
