Critical Need
Wild Microbes is tackling entrenched challenges in industrial bioproduction. Frequent issues arise when scaling bioprocesses, including batch loss, process robustness, and elevated cost structures. Solutions to these challenges are currently limited by the narrow host range available to most product companies. Hundreds of microbes can be found in just a teaspoon of soil, but bioproduction relies on only a handful of well-studied laboratory strains. Leaving the vast majority of wild microbes on the sidelines artificially limits industry’s ability to solve pressing challenges. The key to unlocking these sidelined wild microbes is effective genetic tooling.

Technology Vision
Using a suite of genetic tools, Wild is developing a catalog of diverse, industrial-ready microbial strains. This catalog will feature “natural athletes” of all kinds, including extremophiles, microbes with diverse metabolic profiles, and microbes that consume renewable feedstocks. While building its microbial catalog, Wild will partner with companies throughout the bioeconomy to accelerate their strain engineering efforts. For instance, Wild will help agricultural biotech companies to rapidly engineer microbes they identify in the plant rhizosphere for carbon or nitrogen fixation.

Potential for Impact
In the effort to decarbonize every part of the economy, two sectors have been particularly difficult to change: heavy industry and agriculture. Synthetic biology can impact these sectors, and Wild Microbes will act as an accelerant to many of the companies leveraging solutions that depend on microbes. The largest impact area will be to unlock bioproduction of commodity chemicals, fuels, and foods cost competitively, and at scale. This will allow the economy to shift away from oil and natural gas as its primary physical input and toward renewable feedstocks such as carbon dioxide, methane, and agricultural waste.

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