{"id":669440,"date":"2025-05-15T22:30:32","date_gmt":"2025-05-15T19:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/fieldstone-bio-is-building-microbes-that-can-sense-everything-from-tnt-to-arsenic\/"},"modified":"2025-05-15T22:30:32","modified_gmt":"2025-05-15T19:30:32","slug":"fieldstone-bio-is-building-microbes-that-can-sense-everything-from-tnt-to-arsenic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/fieldstone-bio-is-building-microbes-that-can-sense-everything-from-tnt-to-arsenic\/","title":{"rendered":"Fieldstone Bio is building microbes that can sense everything from TNT to arsenic"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The world is awash in data about, well, the world \u2014 thanks to satellites and environmental sensors. But there\u2019s still a lot we can\u2019t see, and Fieldstone Bio thinks microbes can change that.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019ve evolved to sense and respond to information. It\u2019s just trillions of calculations going on at all times all around us,\u201d Brandon Fields, Fieldstone Bio<\/a>\u2019s co-founder and chief science<\/a> officer, told TechCrunch. \u201cHow do we take that and actually manipulate that to gain benefits for us?\u201d<\/p>\n

Fieldstone\u2019s technology<\/a> emerged from that question. The startup was founded in 2023 after spinning out of MIT, where professor Chris Voigt\u2019s lab had developed a way to turn microbes into sensors. The scientists programmed the microbes to change color when they encountered something of interest, whether it be nutrients in soil or landmines hidden in the dirt, and then figured out how to detect them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe key technology out of Chris\u2019 lab is this idea of, \u2018How do we actually visualize these cells from really far away?\u2019\u201d Fields said.<\/p>\n

Fieldstone Bio recently raised $5 million in seed funding led by Ubiquity Ventures with participation from E14 and LDV Capital, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The startup has been testing its technology in the lab, and the funding will let it test those microbes in the real world.<\/p>\n

Each strain is tailored to sense a particular compound, such as nitrogen on a farm field or TNT residue from a landmine.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe isolate microbes from the environments we want to sense,\u201d Fields said. \u201cWe build our sensors the DNA pieces, and we just drop them into these different ones and see which ones behave the best, which ones can last the longest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once the microbes are ready, Fieldstone will broadcast them using drones. After the microbes have some time to sense their environment \u2014 several hours to days, depending on the target \u2014 the company will have another drone snap photos of the area.<\/p>\n

The images aren\u2019t the usual aerial photography seen on Google Maps. Rather, they\u2019re taken using what\u2019s known as a hyperspectral camera, which divide visible and infrared light into as many as 600 different colors. Because Fieldstone\u2019s microbes will reflect light at a very specific wavelength, it can train AI models to look for those signals amid a torrent of data.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s where the power of AI comes in, because we can start using that information to tease out these really faint signals to produce really cool heat maps of the microbe sensing the environment,\u201d Fields said.<\/p>\n

In addition to agriculture and national security app<\/a>lications, Fieldstone is also programming microbes to detect environmental contaminants like arsenic, CEO Patrick Stone said.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of going to do core soil samples over every 100 feet \u2014 and then you have 100 foot resolution \u2014 we could get a one-inch resolution and really map out exactly where they need to go clean up stuff,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Gene edited microbial sensors broadcast over farm fields are sure to raise the eyebrows among people who oppose genetic modification. Fields said that the company has been in contact with the EPA to ensure that the company follows regulations.<\/p>\n

Fields said that, over time, he hopes the company\u2019s database will become large enough that it can train models to associate other signals in the environment with whatever data is returned by the microbes. That would allow hyperspectral cameras to detect, say, arsenic contamination without needing to spread the engineered microbes.<\/p>\n

\u201cEventually, you don\u2019t need to apply the microbe at all,\u201d Fields said. \u201cYou have drones, planes, and satellites now collecting information about chemical information on a global scale.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The world is awash in data about, well, the world \u2014 thanks to satellites and environmental sensors. But there\u2019s still a lot we can\u2019t see, and Fieldstone Bio thinks microbes can change that. \u201cThey\u2019ve evolved to sense and respond to information. It\u2019s just trillions of calculations going on at all times all around us,\u201d Brandon…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":669441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/GettyImages-170031554.jpeg?resize=1200,800","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[151516,77143,156405,61594,74839,74849,156406,156407,155459,156408],"class_list":["post-669440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-biotech-health","tag-climate","tag-e14","tag-exclusive","tag-fundraising","tag-gene-editing","tag-ldv-capital","tag-microbes","tag-synthetic-biology","tag-ubiquity-ventures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/669441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}