Spirulina is stubborn.
Jim Roberts thought he knew what he was getting into when he ordered a few vials of frozen spirulina culture for the lab. Chock-full of protein and easily grown at vast scale, the blue-green algae made an ideal candidate for a biomanufacturing host: if you could genetically manipulate it, you could turn spirulina into a factory for any number of useful products.
But nobody could. For years, spirulina had defied scientists’ attempts to engineer it.
Roberts wanted to try anyway. His company, Matrix Genetics, had prior success engineering other resistant microbes. More importantly, it needed to find a new direction.
