Changing Bacteria to Make Your Poopoo Smell like Flowers | Founder of Cambrian Genomics Austen Heinz

I'm going to kind of go more into the application and tell you about my next company called Pedomics. Anybody understand this? This is easy. This is an easy one. So this is a lot of low-hanging fruit. I don't want to put too many food metaphors into this, but this is a really easy one. So already all the things that you— unfortunately I have to go there. I'll try not to— I'll avoid saying flavors. But everything you eat and smell, all the scents are genetically encoded in creatures in nature, right? So we can take those pathways out, modify them a bit, put them into bacterium. So some people don't know this, but actually me and you, We're more bacteria than we are human. We have more bacterial cells in our body than human cells, right? And we're finding out that our health, our lives, are really kind of based around the bacteria that grow on us. There's bacteria in our scalp, there's bacteria under our arms, there's bacteria living in our gut called the microbiome. On genital skin, everywhere, every surface of our body is covered in different bacteria. A lot of the scents that we produce are not human scents, or they don't originate from humans, but rather the bacteria that live on us. This is kind of a cool thing because a lot of those smell like shit, honestly, including shit itself, right? Mm-hmm. With this new technology of being able to write and create organisms and the ability to crowdfund these organisms, I wanna kind of drive home that every single facet of each one of your lives is gonna change from the most basic of taking a shit, right? And even these, some of these things are made out of leather, those are going to not come from cows anymore. Those are going to come from genetically engineered skin cells grown on flat sheets. You'll be able to sit on woolly mammoth, you'll be able to sit on— Dinosaurs. Dinosaur skins, human skins if you're a sicko, whatever you want. So this is banana, this produces a very, very powerful banana smell, and I didn't bring any today, but our team in Israel actually transformed these plasmids, pieces of DNA, to create the smell. This is a very simple diagram. This is what's called a promoter, ribosome binding site to convert the DNA into RNA, and the gene. So basically, a nanomachine lands here and is attracted by this, this, this promoter ribosome binding site. So this, this nanomachine called a ribosome lands here and then takes this sequence of DNA letters and converts it to RNA. Another set of nanomachines converts that into a protein. Proteins are made up of Of 20 amino acids. As you know, DNA is made up of 4 letters, 4 different molecules. RNA also made up of 4 different molecules. And then from there you get this, this nice smell, flavor too, smell too. It's wintergreen. So another simple diagram. This is just a simple one protein system. So what's cool about this is we can actually sequence all of your microbiomes very easily. There's a company that we work with on this called uBiome, and hopefully you guys can Google that. And they're basically like 23andMe for your gut microflora, and really all your microflora. They'll sequence all your bacteria, all parts of your body, for, I think, $400, but if you just want the gut, it's about $100. So uBiome.com, they were one of the first companies to get off the ground through this crowdfunding model. They raised about $350,000 on Kickstarter selling these kits for people who wanted to understand their gut bacterium. So what's cool is that we can sequence you, your microbes, And then give you a personalized solution. So we don't have to wipe out your native gut microflora. We can actually just see what your native gut microflora are and replace it with bacteria that are the same that have a single gene change. Yeah. Originally, you would get a PhD for sequencing 2 or 3 genes. So our knowledge of sequence was almost nothing. Then about 7 years ago, Jonathan Rothberg came out with the 454 instrument. And a single run of his machine sequenced more DNA than had been sequenced in all the machines in the world in the previous 5 years. So we had this explosion of data, but we still at this point don't know what a lot of it means. And I'll tell you why. It's very simple. How the hell are you going to understand Microsoft Windows by reading its 1s and 0s source code? Right? You actually, to understand anything, Have to create it, to rewrite it. Think about it like the way that people study stuff today and try to understand that code is they'll randomly flip bits, you know, AATs, you know, just like you might flip 1s or 0s in Microsoft source code, right? So Microsoft, the Solitaire program runs— everything else crashes, but Solitaire runs faster. So you say maybe that has something to do with Solitaire. Right? Or, you know, you change something and then it doesn't boot up. And then you're like, well, I guess that was important. But that doesn't tell you a lot about how Microsoft Windows works. Same thing with a car. I could park a car out there and be like, all right guys, today we're going to learn about how a car works. And I take a wrench and I just smash the spark plug. You see? That thing doesn't run now. That spark plug was important. That's how we study biology today. No joke. The reason why there's so much that we don't understand about the genome still is because we're passively reading it like a book. To really do anything in life or understand anything in life, you actually have to build it yourself.