The Climate Biotech Podcast

On this episode of The Climate Biotech Podcast, Paul Reginato is joined by Robbie Wilson, a research scientist in the Department of Chemistry at MIT, where he leads the RuBisCO engineering effort in Matt Shoulders' lab. Robbie has spent his career working on RuBisCO – the enzyme that fixes CO2 –across labs in Australia, Germany, and the United States. He co-leads the Enhanced Photosynthesis in Crops (EPiC) Project, which applies directed evolution to RuBisCO with the goal of moving improved variants from the lab into field-relevant crops.
RuBisCO is present in all autotrophic organisms, including plants, where it catalyzes the conversion of CO2 into molecules that can be used throughout metabolism.  Almost every carbon atom in your body passed through it at some point. It is also famously slow, and the version inside plants is so structurally fragile it needs a dedicated team of helper proteins just to fold correctly. During his postdoc in Germany, Robbie and a colleague figured out exactly which helpers were needed, making it possible for the first time to grow and engineer plant RuBisCO inside ordinary lab bacteria. That unlocked the door to testing thousands of variants quickly.
Robbie's work also points to why a faster RuBisCO is not necessarily a better one. The fastest versions found in nature live in places like hydrothermal vents where CO2 is abundant, and they perform poorly inside a leaf where CO2 is scarce. The more useful questions are about CO2 affinity, the trade-off between activity and stability that keeps the enzyme from being pushed too far, and oxygen interference. Oxygen interference is when RuBisCO mistakenly catalyzes a reaction with oxygen instead of CO2, an inefficiency which wastes the plant's energy and gets worse as temperatures climb. Reducing that oxygen sensitivity is a central focus of MIT’s EPiC Project, and is a high-leverage opportunity to protect crop yields in a warming world.
Listen to learn why heat waves are increasingly dangerous for staple crops like wheat, how machine learning is reshaping the way RuBisCO engineers choose which mutations to test, and what stands between today's lab results and a real improvement in the field. 
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On this episode of The Climate Biotech Podcast, we are joined by Henry Lee, CEO of Cultivarium, a Focused Research Organization (FRO) that accelerates the engineering of non-model organisms. 
Henry came to biotechnology through electrical engineering, after a chance opportunity to dissect crayfish neurons inspired a passion for using engineering to understand biology while using biology to engineer. During his postdoc in George Church's lab, he pursued what he calls "bucket list science." For one of his projects, he developed new methods to culture and engineer the bacterium Vibrio natriegens, which is one of the fastest-growing organisms ever described and grows roughly twice as quickly as E. coli. That work shaped Cultivarium's approach to the broader problem of non-model organisms. 
Henry believes that the mental model of applied biology has traditionally been far too one-to-one, focusing on a single organism for a single application: “If you’re interested in plastic degradation, well have you heard of this one microbe that does plastic degradation?” In reality, most useful capabilities are shared amongst many organisms, and we would ideally draw on that full diversity to develop solutions. Cultivarium is developing tools to make it easier to work with diverse organisms to find what works best for a particular goal. 
Listen to learn how Cultivarium is changing the way researchers approach engineering non-model organisms.
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On this episode of The Climate Biotech Podcast, Paul Reginato is joined by Kiara Reyes Gamas, environmental synthetic biologist and non-resident postdoctoral scholar at Rice University's 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 communties, 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. 

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On this episode of The Climate Biotech Podcast, Paul 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.
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In Dan 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. 

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