Send us a Text Message. Wastewater is a gold mine for energy, nutrients and water. Marc Wehmeijer dispels myths about breaking in to the wastewater industry, and takes us on a tour of the global wastewater treatment landscape from the deserts of Durango, Mexico to the Swiss Alps. Marc Wehmeijer is the CEO of ThinkTIM, a company that designs, manufactures, installs and services wastewater treatment recycling units. Wehmeijer advocates for the use of artificial wetlands as treatment methods and...

Algae is a high potential and high protein food. Learn how engineers and entrepreneurs like Peter Mponzi are using algae to cultivate the future of nutrition. Peter Mponzi is a chemical process engineer by training and current entrepreneur in algal production. He has eight plus years experience in the renewable fuel industry, and is currently focusing specifically on downstream algal processing and scale-up. Mponzi talks us through the technical, regulatory and market success criteria for...

Join us for a whirlwind tour of the key problems with modern agriculture and the alternative emerging technologies. In this final episode with Agata the biocontainment researcher and Simon, Head of Human Practices, from the Wageningen iGEM team, we discuss how synthetic biology can be used as a technology to prevent crop frost damage. We reflect on using synthetic biology in agriculture and discuss common misconceptions, and the gap between scientific advancements and public perceptions...

In an iGEM competition, open source interchangeable parts of genetic material (BioBricks) allow hundreds of teams of students to create synbio solutions to real world problems. Joined by captain Johannes and treasurer Niko from the 2023 Wageningen iGEM team, we discuss their challenges and ideas about creating novelty, using non-model organisms, and the importance of educating ourselves about novel technologies, not to be dissuade by fear. 

The Wageningen iGEM Team is developing a solution to prevent frost damage using synthetic biology. Listen to find out more about how frost damage affects farmers, markets and us as consumers, and how Wageningen plan the scientific aspects of their project. Get an insight into the dynamics of team work and the attitudes of aspiring scientists. If you enjoyed this episode, follow us and give us a like on your favourite podcasting platforms :) Tune in to more episodes here!

Can you patent a newly discovered protein? Does getting a patent depend on the application? What does intellectual property encompass? Our guests, IP specialists Sara Holland and David Holt from Potter Clarkson, join us to shed light on these topics and explore why protecting biotechnological innovations is crucial. Get ready to expand your knowledge and better understand what can be considered an 'invention'.

Sebastian Cocioba is an amateur scientist  pursuing his scientific curiousities from his home lab and mentoring young scientists via Binomica Labs. His mission is to enable agency through building open source tools and allow anyone to explore the world around them. Coming up in this episode, we talk oceans, what lives in different benthic zones, and also about jargon and communicating science, edutainment and a small bay drone made from trash.   Binomica Labs for science...

Sebastian Cocioba is an amateur scientist conducting research from his home lab. In our previous episode, we discussed how he's building tools for the future molecular florists. Here and now, we take this topic further, starting with the example of a DIY directed evolution machine made cheaply. If you're an engineering student, we encourage you to make, improve and remake his designs. You'll be supporting a community of open source directed evolution machines. In this episode, we also hear...

Sebastian Cocioba is a scientist and researcher building open source tools to make research easier and cheaper. Do you, by any chance, know where the M9 media comes from and what it was originally used? Well, Sebastian went on a two year journey to discover the origin paper of this medium and ended up falling in love with photobiology, better defining his research questions and more. We take the journey with him as he becomes a researcher for hire and starts a mentorship programme for other...

Sebasian Cocioba is an independent researcher, conducting the discovery, research and more from his own home lab. This is part one of our conversation with Sebastian. He details his first experiences in science from seeing a maple leaf and thinking "I need to understand" this,  to being recruited for a start-up and learning how to build a lab from ground up.  Stay tuned for further episodes! Check out his Twitter for what he terms his open lab book:  https://twitter.com/ATinyGreenCell

Doing science is not a lonely endeavour. It involves collaborating with others, using your shared knowledge to find solutions to pressing problems, and pushing past the boundaries of what is known. As an EBRC council member, professor and founder of the Synthetic Biology Young Speaker series (SynBYSS), Tae Seok Moon has dedicated his time to empowering young people in science and solving pressing problems. His mission is to create GEMs (genetically engineered microbes) that can both diagnose...

Dr. Clarice D. Aiello is a quantum engineer interested in how quantum mechanics informs biology. She fearlessly leads the Quantum Biology Tech (QuBiT) Lab in UCLA where she explores if spin physics can account for relevant biosensing and be used to develop technologies. Quantum Biology is a nascent field in both physics and biology and much collaboration is needed to bridge the gap between both fields. Although the data of Quantum mechanics in biology is correlative, research has not been...

Paige Whitehead is CEO and cofounder of Nyoka, a company on a mission to lighten up the world with proteins. But how? In this episode, we explore bioluminescence, its vital uses, and how it could be used to clean up a toxic chemical industry. 

Research is behind bars: paywalls and a closed peer-review process. You pay both to publish and to read published works. A small fraction of scientists are involved in peer review, creating a bottleneck and limiting the range of expertise that can improve rigor. Finally, publishing takes a long time, with the rapidly growing body of scientific literature needing to get through the peer-review bottleneck, stifling the innovative process of scientific discovery and application. Arcadia Science...

Supply chains are large complex systems with vast amounts of data, plagued with problems. Products are contaminated, go missing, are resold without permission, are sold as something else. Within the food supply chain, it can take up to eight weeks to sort a contamination issue. Aanika Biosciences have developed a non-GMO solution to track, trace and authenticate products along this supply chain. Co-founder Vishaal talks us through how using their inert microbial spores can guarantee the...

Current automation is expensive and difficult to use. Scientists have to learn complex programming languages, becoming more programmers than experimenters. Machines they use understand basic commands such as ‘draw one ml of liquid from this tube to the next’, yet the burden of ensuring that protocols and methodologies are complete, carried out accurately and without fault still falls with the scientists themselves. A mountain of manual labour is a main aspect of a scientist’s job. Keoni and...

 The environmental microbiome is facing a series of stresses that have passed the tipping point with pertinent examples including microplastic infestation and desertification. What if we could use microbes on an environmental scale to improve the fabric of this microbiome? Prof Victor de Lorenzo proposes that for the problems in which simply relieving the pressure is not enough, large-scale bioremediation solutions should be employed. We discuss the main challenges in scaling these solutions...

Proteins are the functional unit of all life processes and as such it is important that we maximise our understanding of their interactions with other molecules in order to study their effects. Dr. Tomas Rube talked with us about his recently developed method for estimating protein-ligand binding affinity and the importance of this for understanding transcription factors and how they control our genes.

Optogenetics is the study of light-controlled biological systems, this may sound futuristic, however, many organisms already change in response to light. In this episode, we talked with Dr. Armin Baumschlager about his work and understanding of how we can engineer artificial light-control in biology. We spoke about the applications of this in research, metabolic engineering and how one might go about engineering proteins for light-controlled behaviour.

Biocomposite materials can utilise potentially waste carbon sources and capture them for a useful purpose. For example, Dr. Aled Deakin Roberts talked with us about how he can create a biocomposite material from ashes using a bio-inspired adhesive. Further to this, biocomposites also open up opportunities for additional properties, such as the addition of organic molecules that cannot be added to classic materials as they are broken down at high temperatures, biocompatibility and potentially...

Standardization  of biological parts to make them more independent, scalable and tunable is a hope for the future of synthetic biology. Dr. Brecht de Paepe talked with us about how achieving this standardization would have a tremendous effect on efficiency in the lab and make us better able to build the solutions we so desperately need and collaborate together more effectively. 

Controlling the behaviour and output of microorganisms is one of the most important pieces in the biotechnology puzzle. Without an improved level of control in biology, it is difficult to create consistent results from engineered organisms. Future prospects hope to allow genetic circuits to be designed on a computer and to accurately predict the effect of these gene circuits when they are inserted into living bacteria. Another topic discussed is the benefits of co-culturing bacteria in order...

 Water contamination is an issue we face from past and current industrial activities that affects our health. Of course the ideal scenario would be not to let the contamination escape in the first place, however, this is sometimes unavoidable. FREDsense technologies have developed a biological system that senses contaminants in water supplies and transfers this information to an electrical device for rapid and real-time monitoring of contaminants. 

 Discovering the remaining part of a human genome. The first draft of the human genome was published in 2001, now, over 20 years later, we have a complete sequence of the human genome. The newly complete genome contains sequences that were difficult to sequence using older methods and required newer nanopore sequencing to complete the final parts. The region consists of repeating units of DNA, which at first might sound quite boring but these regions are thought to play an important role in...