Homeworld Collective

On this episode of The Climate Biotech Podcast, Paul Reginato is joined by Kiara Reyes Gamas, Ph.D., environmental synthetic biologist and non-resident postdoctoral scholar at Rice University's Science & Technology Policy at the Baker Institute. Alongside her bench science, she has consistently engaged with the social and governance dimensions of synthetic biology, which shapes how she thinks about engineering microbes for environmental release. Much of Kiara’s work has focused on horizontal gene transfer, the process by which microbes naturally swap DNA throughout the environment. It is how antibiotic resistance spreads, and it is one of the central reasons regulators worry about releasing engineered microbes. The problem is that we have very poor measurements of how often it actually happens in natural settings in complex communities, or which organisms participate. Kiara’s research also suggests that the field's default toward biocontainment may be missing the point for environmental applications. A microbe engineered to clean up an oil spill has to interact with the environment to do its job. The more useful questions are about which genes are safe to introduce, how engineered organisms behave under selective pressure in microbial communities, how to integrate human communities into the governance of these technologies, and whether the regulatory scrutiny applied to recombinant DNA should extend to any non-native microbe being released. Listen to learn how RNA-based barcoding extends the reach of horizontal gene transfer measurements across microbial species, what ecology has to teach synthetic biologists about environmental release, and why Kiara argues that community co-design is an engineering requirement rather than a regulatory checkbox. 🎧 Apple podcasts: https://lnkd.in/evaiBaiJ 🎧 Spotify podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eU-ze32p Homeworld Collective Genetic Engineering Transparency Label #ClimateBiotech #TheClimateBiotechPodcast

Biosphere just landed a $9M DoD contract to extend its UV-sterilized bioreactor platform into gas fermentation, building portable units that make protein from hydrogen (H2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) gases for deployment in austere environments where conventional supply chains can't reach. The hard problem is mass transfer. Gases like H2 and CO2 dissolve poorly in water, and getting them into microbial cells fast enough for commercial use has been a persistent rate-limiter for the field. This funding gives Biosphere a runway to test reactor designs that would be tough to justify on private capital alone. Huge congrats to Brian Heligman and Arye Lipman. For the deeper backstory on Biosphere's thesis, listen to their episode on The Climate Biotech Podcast: Reimagining Bioreactors to Solve Manufacturing Bottlenecks. 🎧Apple podcasts: https://lnkd.in/egSbTuBA 🎧Spotify podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eqXwT_3y

On this episode of The Climate Biotech Podcast, Paul Reginato is joined by Eli Hornstein, founder and CEO of Elysia Bio, a company engineering feed crops to address methane emissions from livestock. Eli came to plant biotech through an unlikely path: undergraduate degrees in ecology and linguistics, conservation fieldwork across East Africa and South America, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Mongolia before a PhD in plant genetic engineering at NC State. That ecological background shapes how Eli thinks about intervention points in agriculture. One of Eli’s core insights is that plant biotech has spent decades optimizing plants for the plant's sake while largely ignoring that those plants are actually for feeding animals. Enteric methane from ruminants is the single largest source of methane on Earth – larger than oil and gas – and most of those animals are on pasture with few practical options for emissions reduction. Elysia's first trait encodes bromoform, a methane-inhibiting compound from red seaweed, directly into corn so farmers don't need to change feeding practices. The company has since expanded into pasture grasses and other crops to reach ruminants outside commodity feed systems. Their most ambitious project, the PlaMMO Project, engineers plants to express methane monooxygenase (MMO), the enzyme methanotrophs use to oxidize methane, potentially enabling crops to pull methane directly from the atmosphere. Elysia is currently running analytical chemistry on their first MMO-expressing plant candidates. Listen to learn about the community of researchers working to de-risk heterologous MMO expression, why plant synthetic biology is underrated relative to microbial systems, and why Eli thinks ecological thinking is one of the most undervalued skills in biotech. Plus, learn how a photosynthesizing sea slug inspired a company name. 🎧Apple podcasts: https://lnkd.in/erhqHJej 🎧Spotify podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eEZN-tPd Homeworld Collective Elysia Creative Biology #ClimateBiotech #TheClimateBiotechPodcast

📣 Homeworld’s new Biomining Handbook is live: an open educational resource designed to help biologists and mining professionals create better projects together - https://lnkd.in/eXN5PQ_P In talking with biologists interested in mining and mining folks interested in biology, we received a common request: Is there a centralized knowledge source to help newcomers to this field? We heard you, and we built it. Our Biomining Handbook combines: • Parallel learning: Mining 101 for biologists and Biology 101 for mining professionals • Flowsheets identifying where biology can be leveraged in mining operations • A complex materials guide: areas of potentially high-leverage for biotech, such as tailings, e-waste, acid mine drainage, and refractory ores • Glossary of biomining-relevant terms • Design frameworks and assessment checklists • Frontier research challenges Whether you are new to this field or an experienced practitioner looking to help build the field and communicate concepts in biomining, we hope you’ll find something useful within the Biomining Handbook. In turn, we ask that you share this resource with colleagues and, if you want to help evolve the material in the Biomining Handbook, consider contributing using the built-in comment form. As a living resource, community input will only make the handbook stronger and more useful for everyone! 🔗 Read the handbook: https://lnkd.in/eXN5PQ_P Thank you to everyone whose ideas and discussions shaped this. Mackenzie Best, PhD Wenying Liu Erin Marshall, PhD Daniel Merino-Garcia Sasha Milshteyn Paul Reginato Gary Schenk Alan Tordoir Luis Valencia Ariana Caiati Colbey Derwin Jayme Feyhl-Buska #ClimateBiotech #Biomining

📣 Microplastics research is rapidly evolving, and it’s important to bring visibility to who is being funded, where efforts are concentrated, and what gaps remain. Field-building in microplastics helps identify new opportunities for actionable interventions against this emerging contaminant. Sarah Daniels is doing great work to make those patterns more visible by mapping out the latest research on microplastics. Check out the tool she built to help show where funding and research efforts are in this space.

Exciting postdoc opportunity to work on engineering a novel methane-oxidizing enzyme in Denmark, with applications in methane mitigation and manufacturing! Methane monooxygenases (MMOs) are natural enzymes that do it, but they are hard to domesticate for a variety of reasons. Carlos is developing an alternative that can be applied more readily, with support from Homeworld and Grantham Foundation.

📣  There is a layer of biology that sits between pollutant exposure and disease onset that biotech has barely started to map. Homeworld Collective is spinning out a new initiative to change that, led by Sarah Daniels, called Engineered Resilience. An estimated 15% of the chronic disease burden in the U.S. is attributable to known chemical pollutants. These exposures act as biological drivers of disease, producing signals that sit upstream of where most interventions happen today. At Homeworld, Sarah set out to explore the gap to motivate the biotech field into action through the Pollution Program, building on a longstanding vision of Homeworld’s co-founder and former Executive Director, Daniel Goodwin. Right now, we are designing novel biomarker studies of past exposures and generating new data on the cellular effects of pollutants. These efforts were made possible by collaborators at ImYoo, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, the Wyss Institute at Harvard University's Diagnostic Accelerator, the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, University of Michigan School of Public Health, and the Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública, and by funding from the Center for Global Development and others. This underexplored area has become a compelling thesis on human health beyond Homeworld’s scope. We are launching our first spin-out, Engineered Resilience, a new initiative focused on identifying signals of exposure and translating them into early screening and intervention strategies. Visit Engineered Resilience - https://lnkd.in/eTbNPJKx The initiative is still in early stages. Sarah is seeking support to expand on primary evidence and partnerships needed to move this work forward from bench science to clinical research to policy reform. We believe this space is massively underexplored and ready for solutions to be built. If you’re a funder, researcher, or entrepreneur interested in this space, Sarah would love to connect. Stay tuned for a series of releases on the scale of impact, funding landscape, and thesis in the upcoming weeks! Rushdy Ahmad, PhD Shad Morton Howard Hu Karen Peterson Hector Lamadrid-Figueroa Jesica Pedroza Claire MS Mehak Kaur, MPH Tatyana Dobreva Jacob Galan Auwal Bala #ClimateBiotech #EngineeredResilience #Biotech #Pollutants #Biopharma 🔗 Read more in our blog: https://lnkd.in/eNgNXrf5

📣 Homeworld Releases Biological Methane Removal Report - https://lnkd.in/emsGAf3p Methane is responsible for roughly 30% of global warming to date, and it's an 80x more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂ over a 20-year period. Even with full deployment of known mitigation strategies, a significant emissions gap is expected to persist through 2050—driven in part by rising natural emissions feedbacks that we can't simply regulate away. Biological methane removal (bioMR) is one of the most promising frontiers for closing that gap, but the field is early, and the key technical bottlenecks haven't been systematically mapped. In Fall 2024, Homeworld Collective and Spark Climate Solutions convened 30 expert researchers from around the world for a two-day workshop, with the goal of surfacing the highest-leverage open problems across four bioMR pathways: engineered methane-removing plants, methanotroph-based bioreactors, and enhanced methane uptake in forests and soils. Workshop participants drafted 22 problem statements, which Homeworld polished and published to guide future efforts by researchers and funders. The report is a collection of those problem statements. Notably, Homeworld has already helped deploy $750k in funding across 5 research teams working on problems addressed in the report. 🔗 Read our blog and full report here: https://lnkd.in/eG_ZTdQW #HomeworldCollective #ClimateBiotech #BioMethaneRemoval

In Daniel Goodwin’s final episode as host, The Climate Biotech Podcast reflects on over 30 episodes of conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, and builders at the frontier of climate biotechnology, and marks the official handover of the podcast to Homeworld Collective's new Executive Director and co-founder, Paul Reginato. Dan and Paul trace their partnership back to MIT, where they were both developing first-of-kind spatial genomics technologies in Ed Boyden and George Church's labs. What started as a shared drive to work on climate change grew into organic community building, and eventually into Homeworld Collective, an organization designed to connect climate biotech practitioners with high-leverage problems, collaborators, and funding. The episode distills wisdom from the podcast's guests so far. When asked what shaped them as thinkers, guests overwhelmingly cited science fiction and art over technical papers. On mentor advice, the theme was self-advocacy: pick hard problems, learn to communicate your work, and trust your own intuition. And when asked where a magic wand of climate biotech should point, answers ranged from better field measurements for methane to the largely untapped interface between geology and biology. At the end of the episode, Paul shares his vision for Homeworld's phase two: refinement and scaling of Homeworld’s methods through more community convenings, a new ambassador program, faster production of problem statements, and more focused grantmaking designed to nucleate productive research communities in underserved, high-impact problem spaces. Dan reflects on his framework for choosing what comes next and highlights the underappreciated connection between environmental pollutants and the 70-80% of human disease that remains sporadic and unexplained. Listen for the best career advice for early-career scientists, like "nail your projects, don't pick your track,” what a tadpole losing its tail teaches us about growth, and why building friendships across disciplinary boundaries can unlock your own potential to impact some of the most important problems of our time. 🎧Apple: https://lnkd.in/eA7mzq_U 🎧Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eb9yphG7 #HomeworldCollective #ClimateBiotech #TheClimateBiotechPodcast

📣 We’ve just published the Homeworld Collective 2025 Annual Impact Report - https://lnkd.in/eMRAkYd3 This year reinforced something we've believed from the start at Homeworld: when you create the right conditions for collaborative problem identification and connect the problems to real resources, the research community responds with creativity, rigor, and momentum. Homeworld exists to nurture the growth of climate biotech by connecting practitioners to high-leverage problems, the right collaborators, and the funding pathways needed to translate insights into action. 2025 highlights include: • $1.5M deployed across 12 greenhouse gas removal research teams • $2.85M+ in all-time Garden Grants across 28 projects supporting 77 researchers • 22 new problem statements from our Workshop on Biological Methane Removal, co-authored with 32 experts across 7 countries • 12 events across 7 cities with 400+ attendees • Two new open-access biomining tools: Orecast Techno-Economic Analysis and Critical Minerals Explorer Now we're entering phase two of Homeworld, where we’ll focus on refining our methods and beginning to scale these climate biotech solutions. 🔗 Read our blog and full report here: https://lnkd.in/egQbY2Ze