This week at Future Meals Tech, Marine Biologics will showcase its expertise—a platform that digitally maps the biochemistry of seaweed and its properties – which the corporate claims has created what’s the world’s first programmable biomass.
Based on the corporate, its proprietary cheminformatics platform, MacroLink, maps the molecular compositions of seaweed and stabilizes them into customizable, liquid-based macroalgae options referred to as SuperCrudes. SuperCrudes, that are liquefied blends derived from seaweed harvested from particular geographic areas, are analyzed to doc their mineral, protein, and carbohydrate compositions. This course of permits Marine Biologics to benchmark every product equally to how oil refineries grade petroleum based mostly on extraction origin.
The corporate was based by former crypto trade government Patrick Griffin, who advised Wired he transitioned from crypto to constructing a platform that would digitally perceive seaweed after a browsing accident brought about him to reevaluate his priorities.
Paradoxically, the accident reignited his enthusiasm for the ocean. Griffin acknowledged a niche within the local weather resiliency market regarding basic constructing supplies. Even when all different international local weather resiliency efforts—akin to car electrification and renewable power investments—have been profitable, merchandise would nonetheless be largely constructed upon plastics or different petroleum-based supplies.
“The chemical compounds and supplies that we use at the moment are, by and enormous, constructed on petroleum,” Griffin says. “It’s the final piece of the puzzle you’ll actually need to chip away at to make a big affect.”
Griffin believes his firm can considerably scale back the prices and variability historically related to bio-based sourcing by standardizing seaweed extracts into dependable and predictable substances.
The broader macro-trend of computational biology is one we’ve been following carefully right here at The Spoon. Examples embrace utilizing AI to speed up pathways towards gene-edited seafood or monitoring startups like Shiru, which intention to construct meals enter discovery engines by mapping meals’s organic constructing blocks. Marine Biologics’ expertise is especially intriguing as a result of it carefully connects to a selected pure biomass that has beforehand struggled to achieve traction in client merchandise—each meals and in any other case—resulting from restricted understanding and inner experience inside bigger CPG manufacturers.
With this coming-out social gathering for its Macrolink platform, the California-based startup is hoping to alter all that, on the similar time turning into each a formulation platform in addition to a supplier of inputs (SuperCrudes) to CPG manufacturers on the lookout for extra sustainable inputs.
