Startup bets their superfast microbe can rewrite biotech

When scientists talk about velocity, they don't usually mean bacteria. But for a small Cornell spinout called Forage Evolution, speedis everything.

The company, founded by three Cornell alumni - Bryce Brownfield, Ph.D. '23; David Specht, Ph.D. '21; and Cameron Kitzinger '22 - is betting their modified version of one of the fastest-growing microbes on Earth can upend how biologists interact with living systems. Its recent acceptance into Cornell's Center for Life Science Ventures, the university's incubator for promising biotech startups, marks its official leap from the lab bench into the commercial world.

"We're starting to digitize the bio side of biotech by giving the fastest-growing organism on the planet a molecular Ethernet port for DNA." Brownfield said.

Forage Evolution's core innovation centers on Vibrio natriegens, a saltwater bacterium that divides roughly every 10 minutes under the right conditions - about twice as fast as E. coli, the microbial workhorse of modern biology. What makes their V. natriegens remarkable, according to Brownfield, isn't just speed. It's the way it takes up DNA from its environment, transforming itself without the expensive equipmentor hands-on processing in a biotech lab that's typically needed.

In a recent paper in the journal PNAS Nexus, Specht demonstrated that by engineering V. natriegens to express a gene known as tfoX - a master regulator borrowed from Vibrio cholerae - they could create a strain capable of performing "natural transformation" in a single, simple step.

In lay terms, the bacterium becomes biologically competent: able to absorb DNA directly from its surroundings and incorporate it into its own genetic code, all while growing in a minimal salt-and-acetate medium.

"This makes it incredibly easy to engineer DNA in a microbe," Specht said. "This allows people who are not traditional biologists to do real, serious DNA manipulating. And if it becomes easier to do these processes, it's easier to automate and scale these."

That process historically takes hours of precise temperature shifts, specialized equipment and significant human oversightspread over several days. The Forage Evolution team's approach, by contrast, can occur entirely at room temperature with no capital equipment. It's plug-and-play synthetic biology, according to Brownfield, the method requiring 80% less hands-on time and potentially producing results within a single workday.

The implications are broad. Because the cells can maintain their ability to transformfor prolonged periods at room temperature, the process could open the door to low-cost, large-scale and even automated systems for "directed evolution" - the iterative tweaking of genetic sequences to develop new enzymes, materials or chemicals. That kind of work has long been the purview of institutions with expensive infrastructure. Forage Evolution's system, by contrast, could make high-throughput genetic engineering accessible to smaller labs, educational institutions and developing-world research centers.

"Democratizing biotechnology" has become something of a cliché, but Forage Evolution's approach gives the phrase technical substance. The team's method eliminates the need for centrifuges, heat baths and costly electroporators. Instead, the microbe performs its own transformation under physiological conditions, using acetate - a simple, low-energy carbon source that can be derived from electrochemical conversion of carbon dioxide. That makes the system not just faster and cheaper, but potentially more sustainable.

"Forage Evolution taps into this magical marine bacterium and develops a simple and efficient way to insert DNA, making it a powerful alternative to E. coli," said Ying Yang, the CLSV's director. "This is a potentially game-changing approach with many impactful applications such as automated synthetic biology platforms, low-cost biotech education kits and sustainable biomanufacturing."

Acceptance into the incubator gives the young company access to Cornell's laboratory infrastructure, investor networks and mentorship from biotech veterans. The center, which has helped launch several successful life-science firms, focuses on shepherding university research with commercial promise through the critical early stages of development.

"The incubator gives us lab space, and this would be impossible without that," Brownfield said. "And they've connected us with a lot of impactful mentors, with people on the business development and the legal side. The access to experienced leadership is great. One of the senior executives-in-residence, Bill Rhodes, has a background with products like ours."

Forage Evolution has a plasmidcloning kit coming out in the next few weeks, Brownfield said. For now, he said, the startup's focus is on building a suite of tools for other scientists and companies that want to use V. natriegens as a biological "chassis." The bacterium's unusual metabolic flexibility allows it to grow on diverse substrates, even nonsterile seawater, making it attractive for biomanufacturing platforms that aim to minimize cost and resource inputs.

In the long run, Forage Evolution envisions using the microbe for producing sustainable bioplastics, biofuels and specialty chemicals.