Built with Biology: Spotlight

It's so fun to get packages in the mail! Or to ship holiday gifts, your hard-made products, and your heartfelt thank yous. But what's not fun is the impact styrofoam and bubble packaging have on our environment. Meet Ecovative, a leading company innovating modern life with mushrooms! Mycelium packaging is stronger, sustainable, shapable, and fully compostable. Hear all the amazing things we can do with mushrooms to help our planet!

Many of the everyday items we use like plastics rely on processes that spew huge amounts of CO2 into our atmosphere, causing climate change. How can we decarbonize these industries and transform modern life to be more sustainable? Meet Cemvita Factory, a company engineering microbes to eat carbon dioxide and output useful products like ethylene, glucose, and oxygen. These innovations can help companies decarbonize dramatically and could also be used for space travel!

Our pets are part of the family. They have their favorite nap spots (right where you will trip on them), favorite socks to chew on, and, of course, favorite foods. People the world over are working to lower their personal environmental impact. But how can we do the same for our pets? Meet Wild Earth, a company making sustainable dog treats and kibble! Listen to Spotlight hosts Nikita and Fiona laugh about their pets, make hiking plans with bio-designed dog treats, and even plan for cultured mouse meat for cats!

Love 'em or hate 'em, spiders are amazing creatures. The silks they spin are some of the most interesting and diverse materials found in nature. But spiders can't be farmed for these materials, which are stronger than steel, yet stretching, and soft. Meet Spiber, the bio-materials company brewing spider silk proteins through fermentation! The company has spun its material into t-shirts, Haute couture dresses, major fashion collabs, and even a skateboard! Listen to hosts Fiona and Nikita riff on fashion, biology, and even a new appreciation of spiders!

Like all of nature, humans communicate to society with colors and patterns, in our case, through fashion! But today's garment fashion industry uses trillions of gallons of fresh water and toxic chemicals to dye clothes. Meet Colorifix, a new company dying clothes using microbes with added genetic instructions to make specific colors! These microbes are a drop-in solution to replace chemical dyes, save water, and brighten up our style with biology!

Our world is full of light - electric light. While these lights have ushered in the modern world, from safer cities to studying all-nighters, their harsh light isn't kind on our eyes or our planet. Meet Glowee, a company working to bring nature back into our daily lives with bioluminescent microbes! Imagine all our modern conveniences illuminated by soft, calming, environmentally-friendly light. Would that be lovely? Nous aimons Glowee!

Leather is an amazingly versatile material. But getting leather from animals is a labor-intensive and toxic process. Now biomaterials company, Bolt Threads, is reinventing this classic material with mycelium! Soft, sustainable, animal-friendly —and stylish!— mycelium leather is taking sustainable fashion to a whole new level.

Do you love sushi? Hosts and Fiona and Nikita can’t get enough! So what if we could eat the most amazing seafood in the world without disrupting or damaging our fragile ocean ecosystems? Wildtype, we’re looking at you—we can’t wait to try cell-based sushi!  Warning, you may be hungry after listening to this episode... Credits: Hosted by Fiona and Nikita, edited and engineered by Bryce Joseph-Nelson

"Fish are friends, not food!" But what about sharks? These amazing creatures are routinely hauled out of the deep for their livers - specifically the squalene in their livers, a common product in skincare and beauty products. Amyris, and their consumer product company, Biossance, have created squalene from sugar cane. Learn more about this bioengineering technology and how it's protecting our shark friends!

Imagine riding down the slopes on some super sick skis. Now imagine those skis are made of algae. Wait, what?? Checkerspot and their consumer-facing brand, WNDR Alpine, are making high-performance polyurethane foam using oil made by microalgae. Hear how bio-production is taking over from crude oil, helping our planet, and our powder run!