A plant and feedstock agnostic approach to crop protection and waste stream valorization

Deep Root Biolabs, a spinout of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, has developed a platform for engineering microbes in the environments where they natively live, including inside plant tissue and within contaminated industrial sites, rather than relying on a handful of domesticated laboratory strains.

Standard fermentation and bioremediation depend on lab-adapted organisms that underperform on the variable, contaminated, real-world inputs that industrial waste streams actually present. By engineering microbes already adapted to harsh, waste, and host environments, we act directly on the feedstocks and sites that defeat conventional approaches, and increasingly convert those liabilities into revenue by producing high-value compounds from the same streams we remediate.

We source microbes native to a target environment and engineer them to gain designed functions while retaining the environmental fitness that lets them survive and perform in place. To date we've focused our efforts on industrial remediation and biomanufacturing.

Proof to date.

Plant endophytes: engineered microbes living within plant tissue to confer new capabilities on the host, including improved tolerance to phytotoxic compounds at industrially impacted sites, with the same approach now being adapted to protect crops from below-ground disease. Remediation: microbes sourced and engineered from contaminated environments have degraded cyanide and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) to below detectable limits. Valorization: we are now coupling that remediation with production, with early results converting waste-stream inputs into a high-value compound (market value ~$495/mg).

Next steps. Scale the remediation-to-valorization coupling and identify partner waste streams to prove it on, prioritizing streams where a target molecule carries high value and the remediation itself removes a disposal or compliance burden.