About us
Seth (Founder and CEO)
I'm a cancer biologist turned plant-obsessive. My background is in mammalian synthetic biology, but I love picking up new sciences. I saw a gap in the application of synthetic biology approaches to gymnosperms (the clade including conifers) despite the huge economic potential in paclitaxel and its derivatives. I realized that everyone before me who failed to genetically modify these organisms had been doing it wrong.
What we do differently
The field of plant synthetic biology has been using a one-size-fits-all approach, where the same DNA constructs are employed ubiquitously for different plant species. While this has worked fairly well within angiosperms (the flowering plants), gymnosperms are too evolutionarily distinct and require tailor-made constructs to stimulate their transcription factors and achieve gene expression.
.jpg/:/cr=t:16.67%25,l:0%25,w:100%25,h:66.67%25/rs=w:1209,h:605,cg:true)
The royal 'we'...so far
I'm currently a one-man team. Most of my work happens in my home laboratory, where I derive cell lines and perform genetic transformations. Future R&D roles will center around lab automation, high-throughput screening, bioinformatic mining, and HPLC-MS.