Day two stuff

Many shoutouts to our sponsors this year. We have EncryptGen.. FoundersFund... shout outs to them. Without their support, this wouldn't be possible. We had a great turnout this year. It's early morning guys, it's labor day weekend. Many people are partying, I get it. We're going to kick off today with, we have, the opportunity to award a few groups a grant with all the money from our sponsors. That's how we are going to kick off today, we're going to let them exchange their projects and explain why they are passionate about it and explain themselves. Cool. Where are they at? Where are the winners at? Come on up guys, claim your prize. There were a lot of candidates that applied to this grant and we only awarded 5 people for their cool ideas. We asked for a proof of concept and some experimental work they have actually done. We had a lot of interesting entries including a cool video game which was twitch-streamed and it's like what fungus... it's like a fungus growing on a petri dish and then you play the video game based on the petri dish. It's pretty crazy. We have a lot of cool stuff. These winners... they are going to give their little pitches.

# Art?

Hi everybody good morning. Welcome. My name is Carolyn Angleton and I'm a bio-artist and biohacker. I'm going to tell you a little bit about my journey that brought me to biohacking as well have a three-part group that consists of an education component, scientific component, and art component in the project we're working on. I started out.. my education was as a traditional artist quote unquote. Starting a sculpture art practice... and then I worked on that for a number of years and then taught at universities. In 2012, the first wetlab in an art school was developed by Susan Anger at the school of individual arts. She has done a lot in terms of pioneering in this field. I was one of their first residencies they had and I became interested in bio-art. The progression of bio-art is that it is initially engaging biologists in terms of looking at it and visually depicting it and trying to work directly with a biological organism in terms of manipulating that organism. I started out focusing on a project having to do with.. I was interested in how color moves through organisms... and how color could be a signaling device in an norganism. When we do research across specieis, we have to loo kat signaling devices we might not be familiar with or are difficult to read. I was initially working on a historic community in California where there are all sorts of variations of chamelia... irrigation has been read for a long time in Japan and then moved over to the US. Variation in chameleons might through inheritance or viral infection, which is a great metaphor for art and biology. I was looking at how colors broke a sequnetially processed petals... I began looking at how variation looks on a microscopic level, how cells look lying side by side based on signal on and signal off. A next step as an artist when you're trained in traditional art schools, there are many things in art that lend itself towards biohacking. In art, you're using metaphor and visual depiction but you're also embedding your ideas in a historical context.. a current social context.. and you're using a process of envisioning in terms of envisioning the future. We don't really have an overview of a structure for how to create a new biological world. I think there's hints in terms of how artists approach how to create something from nothing. I wanted to get more involved in the biological process and skills so I did some looking around about how to do that. i found some places in NY to do that including Genspace and the School of Visual Arts. I live outside of Sacramento so I started working with the plant bio group at CCL... community biology program... a professor at Saylano college which has a biomanufacturing program... there's innovation in terms of college for the accessibility of research for biomanufacturing and biotech. I worked with my two colleagues here for developing a project abou thow to visualize how colors sequentially develop across organisms. I'm going to turn this over to Dr. Adam to tell us a little bit about that.

Hello. Okay. To answer the question of Carolyn's... there's a lot packed in there... as a science educator, I see a lot of aspects of biology and chemistry in addressing that question. There's a lot of things I teach in my classes about what is color in the first place, how do molecules interact with light, what about gene regulation, how are the genes turned on and off to make those chemicals and colors? As a biology enthusiast, I want to look at the question of how to interact with a system like that by manipulating DNA in a lab. In theory, that's not so difficult. We chose a synthetic biology pathway for carotidnoid or nicatareeniene for synthesis... The enzymes are knonw, it's well-characterized, beta-caretin are loud and orange, it's expressed in ecoli and there people like to see that. It's familiar and people can relate to it... So what we decided to do was to get some ready-made components. It turns out that from the biobricks part registry you can get many of the enzymes involved in this pathway.. already present in ecoli and actually turn it into... light.. we can get inducible promoters to turn-onoff the expression of these genes and we get some plasmids and ecoli cells. The last gene that converts lyfssof...  arabinose inducible, zn incducible, zn repressible. Constructs with biosynthetic and regulatory genetic combinations. Zinc inducible/zinc repressible promoter system. We can put these into plasmids with different antibiotic selection to co-transform them into bacterial cells. This creates a system for students where we can start to examine the pathway and gene expression. This system can be used to illustrate key biological concepts, and tailor it to different audiences for degrees of sophistication. We can use it to look at gene regulation, and it also works in high school classrooms because all you need is to use the plasmids and trnasform them into cells and we can let students work out parts of the pathway themselves. In addition to a teaching tool, we can use this for art, for where Carolyn is coming from. Hugo?

# Fiat lux labs

JZ: One of the biggest problems we see in the biohacking community is that everything is self-funded. People are funding everything out of their own pockets because there's no system built that allows people to get money to support their projects. You either go to the startup route and have a business idea and raise money, or you fund it yourself because there's not grants for biohackers. I reached out to Founders Fund and some other people. These people really need help and they are doing some of the most interesting projects I've ever seen. .. I'm pretty excited for all these grant winners. If you want to collaborate or you have an idea that you want to work with them on, or osmething you can help with them out on, the nfind them and talk with them. Coming together as a community and creating stuff is what we need. A lot of cool projects and then so many people will be oppressed by us that they will give us all the money. Just throwing money at you. You got it? Okay. Yes.

# ...

Hey. My name is Niaria. I am from Mexico. I'm representing a startup called Scinta. It's a grou pf opeople trying to make more accessible lab technology. We want to find a way to do research and use synthetic biology. We started with that idea because this community was so inspiring for us last year. Last year, we heard about Counter Culture Labs and Biocurious and some crazy guy selling genetic engineering kits. We wanted to start to develop our own projects in Mexico but we didn't have the resources or DNA lab equipment. We decided to do our own equipment and tried to empower people to do biotech in Latin America. This year we started some prototypes of synthetic biology lab equipment. We also didn't know how we-- communication with society about synthetic biology. We decided to do a proof-of-concept of something flashy or something traditional that represents innovation in that field. We bought the kit to genetically modify a ... and we got a DNA.. and also.. which transformed the .. in our lab.. The proof-of-concept was something that could express green fluorescent protein.. and trying to build .. in Moneterey.. working with microbreweries in the region. We create our... the first... prototype of a ... in Mexico.. knowing that Mexico has strong regulations related to biosecurity. Our idea was exhibition of bioart where people can know about that topic and try to communicate the idea to empower them. What we do first? We tried to.. people can drink that beer.. and we can then.. the institution in charge.. in Mexico.. and synbio.. the community of biosecurity of all the animals. The president told us in the future the genes that was Diego we can use protein native legal so we plan a whole event in the museum of art and we communicat eand bite people to know about thi sproject and two weeks before this venue we told other representatives of convertice institutions in Mexico they told us if we serve the beer at the event this will be a crime. So we start with all the process and labelmaking and we only have this irrigation. That was interesting event because we got like two hundred people attending that. We also through a collaboration with community labs we invited to.. a member of Counter Culture Labs to show the work with biomedicines and other organisms that he found in Mexico. We plan to continue with a proof-of-concept with different proteins and different methods to secretion... to approve genetic modified product. What we want to express different... purple, yellow, and try to experiment with different source of life in different spectrum. With GFP, we have to use super-powered UV light like 300 luminars. This is superpowered light that can burn your skin and your eyes. You have to be really careful there with the power. We want to establish a secretion system through other platforms to allow the genes to secrete proteins and also do other processes. The problem with commercialization.. is anthropolgist... a market for gene expression, we're trying to improve the autotrophic market for this proof-of-concept. We hope to show how a traditional product can be innovative by using synthetic biology. Thank you.

JZ: That was awesome. I'm so glad we get people from completely different cultures and countries.


# Fiat lux labs

My name is Josh. I'm a fermentation enthusiast. I'm one of the co-founders of fiat lux labs. We build tools to scale biology. Why did I get into large-scale biology? This is the stock price ofr a company called Amyris Biotechnologies and I follow this company pretty deeply because ....  Amyris set out to make hydrocarbons or petroleum based processes in biology. The problem was that these products are have to be done in a very large .. because htere's a huge demand .... Synthetic biology for this is better. You're using sugar, you don't have to ... I wanted to come up with some sort of solution to allow for large volume manufacturing products whether fuels like Amyris or other things. Y ou can't ....

# Introduction

JZ: ... It says bio-art on the back. Is my nose really that big? I wonder what it tastes like. Does it taste like me I think? Tastes like lemon peel. I appreciate it.

Today is going to be interesting. We had some speakers cancel on us in the last minute. The schedule is going to be pushed around a little bit. Don't fret. Everything is going to happen in due time. All speakers you see on the schedule you see right now will hopefully be speaking. Maybe one or two.... but you should get all the awesome talks that we have, don't worry. We'll probably break for lunch around noon. We have something exciting before that. You'll have to wait and see for that.

# .. Fiat lux labs again

.. They weren't able to be competitive. So that's what I wanted to solve. The problem is that when you go from the test tube stage to a large-scale fermentation stage, it just doesn't scale well and you can't get the same amount of product because it doesn't work the same way. This is a bit of an abstract way to look at it. This is the way I look at it- because this is what I think is happening. When you take your strain of organism whether yeast or whatever, it doesn't function the same way in fermentation environments. There's a bunch of reasons why you can't get the same volume but there's a few different reasons. One is that yeast can't hold its metabolism up to the standards when producing a product. There's a couple of other reasons. The thing that I found interesting is that currently what people are doing is when they track things in fermentations, they don't actually pay attention to how the organism is growing very well. There are sensors that do that, but it's not done in a way that really gives you a lot of information about what the organism is doing. So, um, this is what the process is to scale up right now generally... obviously, it's very simplified here, but you take a strain that is optimized to produce whatever you want whether beer or nylon, you put it into a pilot plant, you find the conditions where the yeast produces the product and then after you get past the pilot plant stage, you want to build a large factory where you don't change anything at all. In the pilot plant stage, it takes millions of dollars to do that development and there's no standardized methodology for scaling up and it's done differently every time. I guess that's the point of a pilot plant, but there has to be a better way to do it, so that people who have ideas about strains can have a way to scale-up rather than going to a few companies that do it.

We want a sensor cloud platform where we can store other people's data and let people look through it and the process for scaling up gets more standardized. We don't want people reinventing the wheel every time they scale up. This is our solution. But really, what I've found cool is tha twe wanted to build new sensors as well, to really provide more information about what's happening at the fermentation step. This is one of the biosensors that we want to use-- luciferase is the enzyme that allows fireflies to glow... I thought this was cool. When we got into it, this is what's actually happening. You don't have to worry about this luciferase equation, but you should notice it uses ATP. You can use this enzyme reaction to determine the ATP concentration of whatever sample you want to study. The reason we focus on ATP is that it's the currency of life and it's available in whatever organism you're using. So we thought it would be a good standard metric that would give us information about how the organism is doing and how it is living during fermentation.

You can't just take manual samples from fermentation and keep doing hte asay. This is what I was doing initially. But you have to build a sensor that you can put in a brewery or any kind of industrial fermenetation to get data that you need. We redesigned it such that we fix the enzyme on a nylon strip and then we flow the fluid over that enzyme and we have a sensor blocked by glass. We can look at the light and figure out the ATP concentration in the solution. We do this continuously so we can look at the ATP change in whatever fermentation we are studying.

Because we are understanding what is happening at the fermentation level, it's not a black box anymore. You can see real-time process visualization. This makes the process of scaling up a bit easier in our eyes because you can look at characteristics and you cna change your environment as it's happening.

These fermenters are pretty big. These are 1000s of liters. If you have contamination in a brewery and it occurs early but oyu only detect it after the fermentation is finished, then you are losing a ton of revenue because you have bad beer sitting in a fermenter that's not doing anything and you're wasting your capital equipment. So we were tracking ATP concentration over time, and what we found is that, when metabolism curve, so ATP over time, how ATP is changing, is actually different for batches that are contaminated vs batches that are uncontaminated. We built a computational model and you can enter in data and it will tell you if contamination has occurred and it will tell you within 6 hours and htis is better than anything on the market. This is just one application of the technology we're using.

yash@fiatluxlaboratories.com