News Digest #240 – How these synbio startups are transforming agriculture, making DNA at scale, and more (sponsored by Codexis)

Hi all,We just have 45 tickets left for SynBioBeta! And the free Synthetic Biology Week satellite events are 50% sold out! We’ve made this great PDF summary of the schedule and also a PDF of all the Synthetic Biology Week events happening next week too. Check them out here.

Also this week, we discuss how Pivot Bio is giving farmers the tools to transform agriculture, feed the world, and clean the planet. They have developed microbes optimized to deliver nitrogen to plants, reducing farmers’ reliance on petroleum-based fertilizers. Pivot Bio CEO Karsten Temme will be at SynBioBeta next month to discuss agriculture’s pivot toward sustaining water and air quality in a fireside chat with the World Economic Forum's Nishan Degnarain.

In other news, we take a look at how Manchester’s SYNBIOCHEM is harnessing synthetic biology to speed up the production of chemicals and materials, and how DNA synthesis is one of the fundamental building blocks of synthetic biology; yet the capability to produce high-fidelity DNA at scale remains out of reach. We spoke with Tim Brears, CEO of UK-based Evonetix, which is developing a new approach to highly parallelize DNA synthesis.

Tim Brears will be speaking in the focus panel: Companies that change the rules of the game (sponsored by Civilization Ventures) at SynBioBeta 2018. Also, don’t miss the session talk on why protein is (still) the killer app, sponsored by Codexis, and CEO John Nichols’ workshop: Codexis protein innovations: Impacting real world markets, rapidly.In case you missed it, here’s our report on how synthetic biology startups are attracting venture funding in record amounts, with $1.9 billion making 2018 the largest year ever – and that’s only counting deals closed by early August. We also published a report and a webinar on how synthetic biology is a critical new tool for the biopharmaceuticals and healthcare industry today – engineering not just genes or proteins, but entire cells as therapeutic agents.I hope to see you at SynBioBeta!Cheers,John

These super-microbes could fix agriculture's nitrogen problem

Thermo Fisher Scientific releases gene synthesis and genome editing products in China

Asilomar Bio rebrands as Sound Agriculture to help growers increase productivity

Ingenza takes a stake in new spin-out company Amprologix