Plastic → perfume?. On the new Climate Biotech Podcast, @cxarramirez shares how his lab uses Antarctic enzymes to break down plastic at low temps and turn it into high value products, like fragrances, that actually fit Latin America's market needs. 🎧

Curious about the climate solutions researchers are aiming to address?. Check out the 50+ public problem statements on

Why share problems openly?. Homeworld identified two critical gaps in the climate biotech space: risk-tolerant funding and limited interaction and collaboration among teams. Garden Grants addresses both issues by spotlighting the most urgent challenges and supporting the bold.

These problem statements pinpoint what researchers believe are the most critical challenges that biotech can solve in greenhouse gas removal. By sharing the problems transparently (while keeping proposed solutions confidential), we aim to foster cross-pollination of ideas,.

📢 Big news from Homeworld:. We’ve published over 50 problem statements from proposals submitted to our second Garden Grants program, focused on greenhouse gas removal.

Read the blog post and report here:

◾️Want to help shape this? We’re deciding whether to extend this AI-based TEA tool more generally. If you think a low-cost, AI-driven TEA can speed up your biotech journey, please let us know. Your feedback will guide us on whether to invest more resources into making this tool.

◾️Where are we now? We’ve wrapped up our prototype stage (read the report in our latest blog post) and are shifting our focus to biomining. Jesse and Jayme are spearheading a new TEA product specifically for biomining, and we’ll roll out a usable version soon.

At Homeworld, we have been prototyping an AI-driven TEA tool in order to help biotechnologists map their ideas to deployments. ◾️Why use AI? Currently, it costs $5k-$10k to even get a basic model started, but AI can deliver a solid starting point for a fraction of that.

Every technology starts with a techno-economic analysis (TEA) - a basic financial model that bridges ideas with practical feasibility. More than the financial sense, it shows that you (the innovator) knows HOW your invention would become something in the real world.

For more problem statements in biological GHGR, check out our problem statement repository: (.

Solving these challenges would unlock new approaches to biologically-enhanced enhanced rock weathering, potentially making it a more scalable, efficient, and cost-effective method for atmospheric carbon dioxide removal.

Characterizing the soil microbial functions that drive mineral dissolution.

A need for high-throughput platforms to efficiently measure microbe-mineral interactions.

Lack of systematic measurement of microbial weathering activity.

Enhanced rock weathering (ERW) has potential to accelerate CDR, but cost-effective scaling remains a challenge. Microbes could play a key role in ERW by increasing mineral dissolution rates, but our understanding of their mechanisms is limiting progress. Key challenges include:.

During the application window for Garden Grants, we will share problem statements describing challenges in biological GHGR. Today’s focus: Using microbes to speed up mineral weathering for carbon removal.

Solving these challenges could unlock major advances in atmospheric methane removal. Consider applying for a Garden Grant to tackle these problems, or share this with someone who should!. For more problem statements, check out our problem statement.

◾️Developing better assays for pMMO activity ◾️Engineering a de novo pMMO

◾️ Developing genetic tools for pMMO manipulation ◾️ Studying the subcellular environment of pMMO