A New Lab Is Brewing Microbes to Create Makeup and Medicines

When the yeast inside finish a four-day run, technicians roll the tables carrying the row of bioreactors into a sealed clean room, remove a sample from each one, and test it to see which mixture helped those microbes do their job best.“It’s kind of like, to go back to a bit of pop culture from the ’90s, analogous to keeping a Tamagotchi,” says Will Patrick, the bespectacled co-founder and CEO of Culture Biosciences. We’re just testing that on a massive parallel scale.”Culture Biosciences helps synthetic biology startups test dozens if not hundreds of versions of microbes.Culture Biosciences can best be described as a virtual fermentation lab, a place where companies can send flash-frozen vials of yeast and bacteria to be raised and tested. Now they’re up to 54, with plans to triple capacity by the end of 2019.“It’s a big capital investment to build out tanks of your own and hire people to run them,” says Nick Ouzounov, co-founder and CTO of Geltor, a company that employs engineered yeast to make animal-free collagen for the beauty industry and Culture’s first client. A human worker sets up each station, but then the reactors run themselves, with autonomous chilling systems that keep each flask at an optimal temperature, even as the hard-working microbes heat things up.A human worker sets up each station, but then the bioreactors run themselves.“The legacy hardware available to all these companies is really arduous and slow to use,” says Patrick.