The world is flooded with data on, well, the world, thanks to Satellites and Environmental sensors. But there is still much that we cannot see, and Fieldstone Bio believes that microbes can change that.
“They have evolved to feel and respond to information. They are only billions of the calculations that occur at all times around us,” Brandon Fields, Stone biographyThe co -founder and science director, told Techcrunch. “How do we take that and manipulate that to get benefits for us?”
Fieldstone technology arose from that question. The startup was founded in 2023 after leaving MIT, where Professor Chris Voigt laboratory had developed a way to convert microbes into sensors. The scientists scheduled the microbes to change the color when they found some interest, whether nutrients in the soil or the hidden terrestrial mines on Earth, and then discovered how to detect them.
“The key technology of Chris’s laboratory is this idea of” How do we really visualize these cells from far? “Fields said.
Fieldstone Bio recently raised $ 5 million in initial funds led by Ubiquity Ventures with the participation of E14 and LDV capital, the company said exclusively to Techcrunch. The startup has been testing its technology in the laboratory, and financing will allow you to try those microbes in the real world.
Each strain adapts to detect a particular compound, such as nitrogen in an agricultural field or TNT residues of a land mine.
“We isolate the microbes of the environments that we want to feel,” Fields said. “We build our sensors the DNA pieces, and let them fall into these different and see which ones behave better, which ones can last longer.”
Once the microbes are ready, Fieldstone will transmit them using drones. After the microbes have time to feel their surroundings, from several hours to days, depending on the objective, the company will have other photos of drones in the area.
The images are not the usual aerial photography seen on Google Maps. Rather, they are taken using what is known as a hyperespectral chamber, which divides visible and infrared light into up to 600 different colors. Because Fieldstone microbes will reflect the light in a very specific wavelength, you can train AI models to search for those signals in the middle of a data torrent.
“That’s where the power of AI enters, because we can start using that information to discover these really weak signals to produce really great heat maps of the microbe that detects the environment,” Fields said.
In addition to agricultural and national security applications, Fieldstone is also programming microbes to detect environmental pollutants such as arsenic, said CEO Patrick Stone.
“Instead of core soil samples per 100 feet, and then it has a resolution of 100 feet, we could obtain a resolution of an inch and really map exactly where they should clean things,” he said.
The microbial sensors edited by genes transmitted through the fields of the farm will surely raise the eyebrows among the people who oppose the genetic modification. Fields said the company has been in contact with the EPA to ensure that the company follows the regulations.
Fields said that, over time, he hopes that the company’s database will become large enough to train models to associate other signals in the environment with the data returned by microbes. That would allow hyperspectral chambers to detect, say, the contamination of arsenic without propagating engineering microbes.
“Eventually, you don’t need to apply the microbe at all,” Fields said. “It has drones, airplanes and satellites that now collect information on chemical information on a global scale.”