The Climate Biotech Podcast

From Microbiome to Macrobiome with Braden Tierney

• Homeworld Collective • Season 1 • Episode 4

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How does a fear of scuba diving transform into a career involving ocean microbes? Braden Tierney, the co-founder and executive director of the Two Frontiers Project, shares his incredible journey from studying the human microbiome to pioneering climate biotechnology. With a dual degree in biology and economics from Duke University and a PhD from Harvard Medical School, Braden’s fascinating story is one of overcoming personal fears and merging diverse skills to create a unique niche in environmental microbiology. His enriching experiences, from internships at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to postdoctoral work at Weill Cornell Medical College, underscore the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in groundbreaking research.

Listen as Braden discusses the strides made by the Two Frontiers Project, a nonprofit exploring life’s diversity in extreme environments like oceans and space. Learn about their groundbreaking research on carbon sequestering cyanobacterium and coral technology, including the discovery of a novel strain, which thrives in high CO2 environments and may hold the key to effective carbon sequestration. This episode illuminates the challenges and triumphs of pioneering research, from early setbacks to successful collaborations that push the boundaries of science and sustainability. Braden's insights into the cultivation of a living microbial database and the development of coral health technologies reveal a roadmap to address planetary-scale challenges.

2FP's innovative strategies and tight-knit collaboration underscore the balance between academic research and practical deployment, aiming to solve medium-term climate problems. This episode serves as an educational and inspirational guide for anyone passionate about harnessing biotechnology for a sustainable future. 

(00:00) Introduction to the Climate Biotech Podcast
(00:36) Meet Braden Tierney: A Journey in Biology
(01:54) Early Fascination with Science
(03:27) Diving into Marine Biology
(05:18) The Importance of Side Projects
(05:57) Combining Skills for Unique Research
(07:53) Academic Journey and Mentorship
(13:26) Postdoctoral Adventures in Space Biology
(15:25) The Two Frontiers Project: Oceans and Space
(17:22) Challenges and Innovations in Microbial Research
(22:13) Challenges in Environmental Sampling
(25:58) The CO2 Story: Promising Isolates
(29:33) Coral Reef Health and Technology
(32:22) Future Expeditions and Climate Biotech
(35:54) Building Expertise for Climate Solutions
(37:52) Skills and Opportunities in Climate Biotech
(40:58) Conclusion and Call to Action

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Dan Goodwin:

I'm Dan Goodwin, a technologist who spent years transitioning from software and neuroscience to a career in climate biotechnology.

Dan Goodwin:

As your host, I will interview our sector's most creative voices, from scientists and entrepreneurs to policymakers and investors. Our guest today is Braden Tierney. Braden is the co-founder and executive director of the Two Frontiers Project. The Two Frontiers Project leverages and explores life's diversity in humanity's greatest frontiers the oceans and space. What you'll hear in this episode is how a very creative biologist combines his unique set of skills to translate his training from the microbiome in humans to the macrobiome in ecosystems.

Dan Goodwin:

Braden did a dual undergrad in biology and economics at Duke University. Then he did a PhD at Harvard Medical School, co-advised by Chirag Patel, who was a leader in the exposome, and Alex Kostik, a leader in the microbiome. He then did a postdoc, co-advised by George Church at Harvard Medical School and Chris Mason at Weill Cornell Medical College. As you'll see, doing things in pairs seems to be a motif of B. So what does it actually take to dive to the bottom of the seafloor, take microbial samples from a volcanic vent that you can bring up and culture on the surface, see if you can guess the number of falcon tubes? So we hope that you enjoy this conversation with Braden Tierney. Braden, my friend, I'm so glad you're here today and I want to just start with the most simple question who are you and where did you grow up?

Braden Tierney:

Hi, thanks, it's really wonderful to be here and to answer your question. My name is Braden Tierney. I am a microbiologist and data scientist and I grew up around the Boston area and, as you can tell from my career, I've also spent a lot of my professional life here. When did you start doing biology?

Braden Tierney:

From a really young age I was really, I would say, intense about putting myself around as many scientists as possible. So as a teenager I managed to end up with a few internships at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, at the Marine Biological Labs all in Woods Hole, massachusetts, which is kind of a mecca for science. There's a lot of different institutions there and you know, at HUI, the first place, I was working with sediment cores like big deep tubes of mud from the bottom of the ocean, actually looking at using the forams that are fossilized in the mud to track, based on oxygen isotopes in their shells to track how ocean climate had changed over time. So it was one of the first projects that I ever did was very climate-focused. And then at MDL, looking at totally different the oral microbiome and how do you visualize the bacteria that live on dental plaque and all this kind of wild stuff. And from then then went to college and started working in agricultural microbiome stuff, looking at biostimulants and biopesticides and so on and so on. And here we are.

Dan Goodwin:

Well, yeah, I mean I think that there's a really natural theme here of from microbiology to macrobiology, which I think really is a pretty good arc and theme of your work. When you were that kid growing up in Boston, did you know you'd be scuba diving to the seafloor to take core samples or scrape ?

Braden Tierney:

It's yes and no in the sense that, like when I was a kid, I read this book called Shadow Divers by a guy named John Chatterton, and Shadow Divers scared the hell out of me. I was in like sixth grade and because that's where I learned about you know what the bends is and like what, how all the awful things that can go wrong when you start scuba diving. And so I read and thought I'm never doing that, ever, ever, ever. But then a few years later I had a chance to sort of do a little sample dive and immediately fell in love with it and thought it's worth the risk, we're going to do it. And from then on I just dove every opportunity I could and I knew that I had this dream of okay, maybe there's a way to incorporate being in nature and exploration with my work someday.

Braden Tierney:

And as I became a more experienced diver, I actually had an opportunity while I was doing my PhD in Boston to intern at a scuba diving shop. I believe during a PhD you should always have a project that is basically yours. It's like a secret. No one knows you're working on it. It's totally distinct from your science, so it keeps you sort of grounded and I had this internship and was like, all right, I'm going to work part-time, essentially at this scuba shop. It's a one mile run from where I was doing all my thesis work, so I could run there over lunch, get like an hour or two work in and then run back. And when I started working there because they gave me a lot of training for really low cost I thought, okay, there might be a way, since I'm getting more professional dive certifications, to actually bring this into my work and actually put this expertise on my CV and start pulling grants where I can go dive for microbes.

Dan Goodwin:

Wow. First of all, I totally agree with the importance of having some sort of side project. My friend, who is now a senior pediatrician at a research university, when he was a med student he opened up a catering business just to do something creative and independent. It feels exactly like you and so I'm curious was it that kind of opportunistic that you knew how to dive and no other biologist knew how to dive? Or was there like a thesis there which is that you wanted to be pushing more great science?

Braden Tierney:

into the ocean, a little column a, column b, I mean. Like there are a lot of great divers, like there's a lot of there. There's more column b, I guess, because, yeah, there's a lot, of, a lot of wonderful people who are like extraordinary divers, I think. You know, I generally believe that you should learn a trade instead of following a passion, or learn a trade first, then follow a passion, and so I love it. I thought I'm going to just become as good as I can at diving and then I'm going to become as good as I can at, you know, data science and as good as I can in microbiology, and then when you combine those that creates something that's unique and that's can in microbiology, and then when you combine those that creates something that's unique and that's a unique skill set, and as long as you've invested in skills that are useful for something, you're going to be able to do unique stuff.

Braden Tierney:

I mean, one of my favorite icebreaker questions and I'd be curious to know your answer to this, is if you could invent an Olympic sport that's a combination of three activities where you would be the best person in the world at it, like you would get the gold medal every time the Olympics happens. What would that be? So like it could be sprinting, maybe not that. Actually it could be like typing really fast. I don't know. I love this, whatever In like three things that you where you'd be the best in the world.

Dan Goodwin:

So I'm going to answer your rhetorical, because chess boxing have you heard of this? What it's actually a sport in England. You can go to a chess boxing league and I went to a class there and it's exactly what it sounds like you know what you do one minute of chess, one round of boxing, and you go back and forth, and so I'm going to hold us off on that tangent.

Dan Goodwin:

But I love this idea, and at Homeworld we think a lot about empowerment and helping people build skills. So I really love that you're being so explicit with that in your own journey, because I think what you do and how you do it is really worth being inspirational to a lot of people. One thing that I really want to push on, kind of in this arc of building trades, is that you do what I would call like maybe like environmental microbiology now, but you're rooted a lot of your credibility is in human microbiome work, and so I think for people that just haven't met you yet, I think it's worth going through a little bit of the narrative of your technical work. So, kind of, starting from Duke, you studied biology and economics. Did you start doing bio research then and what?

Dan Goodwin:

was some of the work that you did in your PhD through postdoc.

Braden Tierney:

Yeah, yeah. So I started doing research, I guess, technically, when I was a teenager. It got a little more intense when I got into college. So there's the one underlying thesis that links together every single thing I have ever done and most things I think about.

Braden Tierney:

Microbes in general are self-assembling machines. They are nature's self-assembling machines. They have been evolving for billions of years and we as humans have this tendency to like anthropomorphize microbes and so we want to be like well, we're going to study them in human context. We're going to study the human microbiome, we're going to study them in the deep ocean. That's like an ocean vent microbiome maybe, when in fact the microbe, the machine, those things are ubiquitous and the tools they use to survive in those environments their genes and proteins and metabolites and the evolutionary mechanisms that sort of allow them to survive, they're all the same. So my kind of core philosophy is that and we'll go into the details of sort of the examples of this is really that like the human microbiome is kind of a fallacy. You're studying microbes that currently colonize humans, right? There are great papers showing that if you want to understand why an enteric pathogen is resistant to antibiotics, you have to look at the evolutionary history of that pathogen, like enterococcus specifically, and when you do that you realize that bug actually colonized fish, land mammals back to fish and then eventually worked its way to humans and in that process it became really resilient and that's why it's a gut pathogen. It has nothing to do with the fact that it's a human microbe. So anyway, that's a tangent and it's a rant, but it's important because I'm going to list a bunch of fields that sound very disparate but they're united by the idea of microbes being ubiquitous, self-assembling machines that can modulate their ecosystems.

Braden Tierney:

Okay, so in college I started working with a couple of different professors in plant biology. So microbes live on the roots of plants and they're capable of increasing plant tolerance to pests In some cases growth rates. They can actually kill plant pests like fungal pathogens and you know even certain lepidopterans and things like that. I started sort of working slash interning at a company that was doing plant-crow interaction, modulation for biopesticide generations and basically, like by my third year of college I was not going to classes anymore and I learned all about microbes and soils and plants and like cool things and how one makes a product for treating roots and you know and all the problems with that and challenges, different kinds of products, all that stuff.

Braden Tierney:

And then it came time to apply to grad school or decide to go into industry and I thought I want to keep trying this research thing instead of trying to start a company or something like that. It felt like I still had to, as I said, learn that trade a little bit Like what is doing research, which is what you're learning in grad school, outside of the undergrad context. So I applied to a bunch of different places and decided that I wanted to focus more on computational work and kind of showed up and was like I'm a computational biologist, which I was not to the degree I should have been and the first year was real hard because I was rotating in computational labs and I credit a lot of really wonderful mentors who were super patient and gave me so many second chances and it was brutal. But I made that transition from a more wet lab position so like working with pipettes and things to like computational work to you know, ok, we're coding all the time and it was very, very long nights of learning how, but then eventually I coding all the time and it was very, very long nights of learning how, but then eventually I got good at it and it became so fun and so I started working with shirag patel and alex kostick.

Braden Tierney:

Shirag is a wonderful professor. He studies the exposome, how the environment you live in impacts your health, um, and alex kostick studies the human microbiome again human microbiome, again human microbiome how the microbes that happen to colonize your gut or body at a given point can impact or diagnose your health. We kind of brought those two disciplines together. We thought we are going to now, or we're going to try and take Chirag's methods for large-scale data analysis of your environment and your genetics and everything and apply them to the human microbiome. So we ended up writing a bunch of papers on microbiome based diagnostics and methods for like specifically using the gut microbiome, like counting the number of genes as like a sort of an ecological event. I want to know how many microbial genes are there in the human microbiome Like? The answer is a lot. How many of those are annotated? How many do we know what they do? And the answer is not many. So that was a lot of that work during the PhD.

Dan Goodwin:

I'm just nodding along. I love the story and I love a lot of the spirit behind. What you say just matches so well to my own personal beliefs the power of second chances and being pushed by mentors. So you wrap up at Harvard Medical School doing a really cool combination of big data applied to human microbiome using two different professors' strengths, and then you choose to work next with Chris Mason. And so Chris Mason is a very famous person in the field who does pioneering work both in space, biology, microbiology, and then also does really wild things like swabbing all of the New York subways.

Braden Tierney:

So Chris does a little bit of everything and everyone who works for him does a little bit of everything, which is great. I like being in places where you can feel your self-learning, even if it's painful. You can literally think, oh my God, I know more today than I did yesterday and like that is quantifiable. And so, yeah, chris and George are both huge thinkers. They work on just about everything and, yeah, I stepped in to that lab and basically being at that intersection it's like a data scientist's dream. Right, you have more data because they have so many collaborators and data sets coming in from every possible thing you could imagine.

Braden Tierney:

And so, with Chris, we did astronaut health analysis of how astronaut health changes when you go to space and the microbes that live in space change. We sequenced and analyzed microbes isolated from the space station to show how their genomes change when exposed to the space environment. We did a lot of and started some of the environmental sampling work. And you know, I knew I sort of went to those labs because, a I knew I'd learn a lot. B the work was cool. C I knew I would have a measure of independence. They kind of were like do the work you have to do and then do whatever you want.

Dan Goodwin:

I think that what's really great to just establish is that you represent a lot of the gold standards of microbiology up to this point, right Trained by fantastic mentors. I really love a lot of the philosophies you know, such as independence and being centered on tactical skills. You're trained as well as anyone can be trained. You could do anything right. You could be a professor somewhere, you could be doing this, but instead you are strapping on your scuba tanks and going to the bottom of very weird places, and I think that's just where it's a great time to just learn about what Two Frontiers project is, and I think a great way to start that is. What does the name even mean?

Braden Tierney:

Yeah, I know it's a funny name. I love it. A lot of us who sort of initially founded it adore it. And there is like with anything, because I grew up in a family of like rambling storytellers. So, like with anything, there's a rambling story. But to sort of keep it tight first.

Braden Tierney:

So the two frontiers refer to the oceans and space. The two frontiers project is what I call a micro institute. We're like a nonprofit research organization with a small team in it but able to apply for grants and basically act like any old university or academic institute, and we're dedicated to exploring life's diversity in extreme environments, with an emphasis on humanity's greatest frontiers the oceans and space and space. And then what's really interesting about those two environments in particular is like life, especially microbes. When they are living in places where you wouldn't expect them to survive, the adaptations they come up with to overcome the adversity of living in that place are always interesting and often useful. So if you live in like a vent with a lot of carbon dioxide, which we'll talk about, you are likely to be a microbe that is capable of feeding off of that carbon dioxide to a certain degree.

Braden Tierney:

And so there's this under this. Again, a lot of this is thematic. It's like the theme of exploring humanity's greatest frontiers enables us to do work that is both important for actually survival in those frontiers and preserving them, and also learn a lot of really cool stuff. So it's leveraging and exploring life's diversity in humanity's greatest frontiers and everything in between. It's a broad name that has more symbolic meaning than a literal one-line punchy thing. I'm fully aware I've never been accused of being practical, and so it sort of reflects that Well, let's hover on the specific.

Dan Goodwin:

Tell me more about this weird bug that lives in a place of very high carbon dioxide.

Braden Tierney:

So essentially two years ago or two and a half years ago, at this point I came across an academic manuscript that had been written by some folks at the University of Palermo in Sicily, italy, and that paper was on the shallow carbon dioxide seeps that were in alien islands off the coast of Sicily. My immediate thought, being a microbiologist and this is during my postdoc I thought, wow, I'll bet if we could sample these seeps, we could find microbes that are very good at sequestering and eating CO2. And I emailed the authors of that paper and said, hey, has anyone ever done this before? And that single email kicked off everything that we have today. Because what happened is we kind of hit it off and became friends and we wrote a grant together and that grant was called A Tale of Two Frontiers Optimizing Carbon Sequestration for Ocean and Space-Based Applic applications, and the whole principle was that carbon dioxide accumulation is a problem in the oceans on Earth and in space Oceans.

Braden Tierney:

Ocean acidification, earth, obviously, greenhouse gas buildup. Space, you have Mars' atmosphere. It's 95% CO2. If we're ever going to live there, we need to do something with it. Potentially, astronauts exhale CO2 on the space station, spaceships, very tight environments. We need to do something with it. Potentially, astronauts exhale CO2 on the space station Spaceships, very tight environments. We need to clean it up. We need self-assembling machines that can remove CO2 from diverse environments. The theme of the grant was we're going to go to these seeps which were shallow enough to be exposed to sunlight, which is really rare among sort of the world and not well studied in the world of marine seeps, especially microbiologically speaking. And sunlight means you're likely going to have phototropes, microbes that live off CO2 and sunlight, kind of like plants do, and we're going to go there, we're going to sample them, we're going to culture things and we're going to find the future of carbon sequestration right. And, of course, like that grant got rejected because I mean it sounds insane.

Braden Tierney:

And so however, just the act of writing it and putting those ideas on paper. In doing so I started talking to friends and sort of some past funders and some other different people and collaborators and, like my favorite microbiologists and scientists I ever worked with throughout my career, and all those people thought, wow, this is kind of a cool idea, we should make it happen. And so we scraped together enough cash barely to go and do this sampling expedition. It was not a lot of money. We went and then I went and you know begged one of my friends, brilliant microbiologist, max Schubert, who's in George Church's lab, and said do you want to try isolating some microbes from these samples? Like you know, I can't pay you, but it could be really cool. I think they're really valuable. And we got them. It was an incredible amount of effort to get them. It was. It's a whole other story.

Braden Tierney:

And, lo and behold, within two months Max pulled out an isolate that was extraordinary in terms of its characteristics to capture carbon or sequester carbon and that kicked off this ridiculous amount of momentum where we were able to raise more money for the carbon initiative. We started a coral initiative for sampling corals around the ocean, working on reef bleaching and climate change impacts on reef. We started building a single platform for using geochemistry to identify culture and conditions, to identify microbes that were useful for everything from methane capture to carbon dioxide. We started building out this living database, which is sequencing every sample we take, every microbe, we take everything we culture and then banking those samples as well so we can share them with the community. And this whole thing happened kind of organically. Because there is, I think, such a desire for this unique outside-the-box kind of research, we started our non-profit and thus the Two Frontiers Project was born.

Dan Goodwin:

I would love to hear more about that. I would also love, if we can, to help people understand why this is so hard. It goes back to your idea of the Olympics and you know the take your own tri sport combination right. To me it's like, oh, you just dive down with a falcon tube. How hard could it be? Yeah, that's what I thought too. I would love to make it as tangible as we can for people that haven't done this before and to really appreciate how good you are, what you do, to do these things. It's more than just a falcon tube, I'm assuming. And are you doing nanopore on the shore or are you taking it back?

Braden Tierney:

Yeah. So to answer your second question briefly, yes, in future expeditions. We've started doing nanopore like right when we're taking the sample, so sequencing immediately which can tell us how to culture, because we can incentivize the bugs there Using low cost geochemistry methods to like evaluate what the chemistry of an environment is, to also start culturing immediately. We have some papers right now on like thermodynamic and geochemistry and sequencing based culturomics to improve cultivability of interesting and engineering engineerability, like of interesting microbes. That engineerability of interesting microbes, that's a whole other thing. But yeah, why is this hard? Well, there's a couple of ways to think about it. First is, when you go from sampling to data, there are so many ludicrously distinct steps in between that require massive interdisciplinary knowledge and I do not claim to have all of it. Like the co-founders of 2FP, with me, krista Ryan and James Hendrickson, respectively one of the best sequencing and next generation of sequencing people in the world, Krista, and then the single most brilliant microbiologist I've ever met, james Then I sort of bring the data science to it and the three of us together are able to do this. Because you need to think okay, I have one Falcon tube, I'm going to take one sample. Well, is it water, sediment, biomass I need to decide that I need to come up with, basically, a way to preserve that sample, to get it all the way back to the United States such that Max can still culture it, which means preserving a cold chain. So you need to get dry ice on your tiny island off the coast of another island where there is no dry ice on most of either of those islands. You need to keep that, so that sample needs to stay at, like you know, negative 80 or however as cold as you can possibly keep it. You need to every, even like labeling the tubes. Okay, I need to label the tubes in a big enough way that the diver underwater can see it, but that label also needs to be translatable to a unique hash. That has to be like printed onto the tube when you get it back to shore. And those hashes need to be matched. You can't mismatch one thing because that messes up everything.

Braden Tierney:

And there's like a data aspect. There's a physical sampling aspect. All the sampling needs to be safe. You need all the right equipment. You need to be able to measure the geochemistry. It has to be fast and we're doing this in a hotel room, right? So we had to have everything hyper deployable. So now all of our kits pack into Pelican cases, briefcases that we can drop ship and take around the world.

Braden Tierney:

Back then it was like, oh my God, james is going to be.

Braden Tierney:

There's all these photos of him with like a hundred degrees in that room, like sweating in his lab coat, like pipetting samples around, cause we're not doing one sample, you're doing a hundred samples or 200 samples that then have to go into enrichments and high CO2 to start the culturing. But we did four different enrichments, so 100 tubes quickly become 400 tubes you have to keep track of in a sweaty hotel room. Then you need to isolate out of the and so it goes like you're dealing with thousands of tubes, tons of equipment and then you have all the logistics. We were moving 10 people around and so there's logistics that did anyway it's. There's always more to think about with this stuff, and that's not even getting into like sequencing, which is such a specific, very hard thing that Christo knows how to do with resource-limited environments. And then also those reagents need to be preserved at a certain temperature different from the microbes, and then that gets into the data analysis, which is also very complicated. So it goes on, and on, and on. I love it.

Dan Goodwin:

I mean thank you for that big, deep dive, Because I think when you just do the data science side of things, it's really easy to be abstracted away from why this stuff is so hard. And so we went deep into why it's so hard. But let's talk about why it's valuable. So I'd love to hear kind of where the CO2 story ends for now, and then would love to hear more about the corals and then eventually we get to.

Braden Tierney:

You know what you're excited about now yeah, yeah, absolutely, um, so I guess I would say it's funny. The co2 story has has certainly not ended. We have this really promising ice loop, a novel strain of an organism called . Again, ax schubert pulled this bug out, banked as utex 3222 in the utex culture collection, so anyone can order it. And what's special about this bug is it grows very quickly in high CO2. We estimated a doubling time of about 2.5 hours, which is very fast without much optimization, like this was. Again, we did not have a lot of money.

Braden Tierney:

This was not the perfect, crazy million-dollar experiment. It was what can we do with the resources we have? And more interesting than growth rate is universally, this bug grows to extremely high dense biomass. So it grows fast, but it makes biomass that sinks. So biomass is just like the stuff that's made when it grows, like cells and goop and all that, and it sinks. And when you compare it to other similar species and strains, they don't sink. So what you now have is an organism that grows quickly, at least in a lab setting, and it sinks to the bottom of whatever it's growing in and in the process is sequestering carbon, and it produces about 22% more biomass than comparison, than other strains and but even then, like, the sinking aspect is really cool, and so there are so many directions you can take this. We can start putting it in raceway ponds and seeing how quickly it can sequester carbon, but the most immediate step is building tools for being able to engineer it so you can have it produce something that's useful, like a carbon to value setting, like sugars or oils, which cyanobacteria are really really good at making high titers of sugars, so that should be doable here.

Braden Tierney:

I'm interested in the biology of why it sinks, which I know again.

Braden Tierney:

A lot of the questions that immediately hook me sound very basic and removed from physics and climate change. But if we can figure out what machinery makes a cell sink quickly, suddenly this one application this gets up to your other question of why it's important that, like we only found, because we looked in this weird co2 shallow seep, this unique thing of this bug that sinks and grows quickly, you can translate that to other organisms that are already optimized in bioreactors. So let's say you had a strain that could produce bioplastic to make new water bottles, but you're having a hard time concentrating that resulting bioplastic, so it's all just floating around and you don't really you're not able to actually easily sink it and get it into one place to make a water bottle. Well, if you knew the genetic machinery for making a microbe sink quickly, suddenly you can concentrate that biomass very, very easily. So this kind of trait that comes from nature can be applied to all kinds of existing bioengineering solutions if you can crack the biology behind it.

Dan Goodwin:

I also love that there's a point of the need to be humble, because I think we just get stuck in biology of looking for the same dimensions, and I'm pretty darn sure I've never talked to a bioinformatician who's ever asked the question does this genome sink? So there's something really beautiful about, like, that question only matters because it's rooted in a practical format right, it's rooted in something that you happen to be doing. Nobody's asking the question does this bug sink? So I love this. What I'd like to do is just kind of shift into the corals and then talk a little bit about some of the specific other expeditions you have, because I know there's some really cool travel.

Braden Tierney:

I mean, the big thing there is. I'm really optimistic about coral reef health, actually, even though we're in the middle of a massive bleaching event right now. Like I would posit if you think about it from a technological standpoint. Right now, like I would posit if you think about it from a technological standpoint, most of the technology that we need to save corals either exists or is in its nascent phase, and that's a really aggressive statement that people in the coral community would probably get mad at me about, but I'm outside it, so it's okay, I won't. I won't see all the tweets, but so. But basically, like you have everything from probiotics that can prevent bleaching.

Braden Tierney:

We have started to develop sequencing approaches to understand what actually coral genomes look like and what microbes and viruses live there. That's what we work on more with 2FP Like how do you understand the system and then modulate it to people like coral gardeners and all these different organizations doing extraordinary coral restoration work, optimizing how we can restore things and how we can basically build healthy reefs as we need to. I'm really interested in bringing together all of those different academics and industry partners into one place and saying let's put our tech together, and I think sequencing is basically the technology that can do that, because everyone needs it, and so that's why we're focused really on developing methods for sequencing corals and using our pipeline to also culture stuff out of corals.

Dan Goodwin:

I'd like to push on one specific detail here, which is that when I talk to people who work in climate biotech kind of in the environmental questions I directly ask what lags behind medical biotech?

Dan Goodwin:

Meaning like you and I have both spent our time in Boston. There's a bunch of big glass, metal fingers of buildings running billion dollar pharma companies. They're very well funded. That creates very good tools and I think everyone accepts that there is a lag in kind of the cutting edge of medical biotech versus the cutting edge of environmental biotech. I look at what you do and it sounds to me like you're bringing the cutting edge into the environmental side. Do you have a specific thing that you think you bring, or is it again kind of this combination of three different disparate skill sets just done?

Braden Tierney:

really well. I mean, I think it's the combination thing to a certain degree, but it's funny you say that my entire when I started my PhD. You can ask my friends about this. What I was saying is I want to commit intellectual arbitrage between medical and environmental science, because medical science gets all the money and so if you can build a reputation there and you can learn the incredible depth of techniques that are being applied there, you can have an outsized impact in environmental sciences if you move them over very quickly. So that's the entire principle. There's just so much to be done. It's a funding thing. That's what caused the disparity.

Dan Goodwin:

I mean, there's so much ambition implicit in all your work. So when you say that we've got all the tools needed to potentially save corals, we just need to do it. The phrase that we use in the home world is action-oriented climate optimism, and that's exactly what I hear from you too. Right, it's just action-oriented optimism. Yeah, I appreciate that. So I want to talk about some of the future trips you have, as well as the idea that climate biotech, we say, is hard in both business and science.

Braden Tierney:

So I would love to talk about your upcoming trips and then kind of land, on how you use two frontiers to navigate this kind of dual difficulty of doing climate biotech. So the immediate upcoming stuff for this year is we have an expedition to Japan which I'm really excited about. That is, we're going to the island of Shikinajima with a wonderful set of collaborators out there and, as some of our folks from Sicily who we worked with, who made the introduction initially actually, and then a bunch of people UFP and some folks actually in Japan, so it's great and what's cool about this island is, like the Aeolians, it's volcanic, there are shallow CO2 seeps, so we're sampling another ecosystem like that. But there are also corals that are exposed to the acidified water from the seeps. So we have our coral initiative, we have our carbon initiative I have been jokingly calling this carburalon because I like a good word combination but basically we're going to be going and doing a lot of experiments in parallel sampling and understanding the corals adaptation both overall physiologically and microbiologically to CO2 seeps, as well as the microbial adaptations along that gradient. So that's kind of the next installation of building out our database and sequencing.

Braden Tierney:

We also got funding through a grant remote with Weill Cornell, to go to the Mojave Desert and identify microbes that will help plants grow on the moon, because there's a part of the Mojave that looks like it's where the original semilunar semilunar regolith fake moon dust came from that NASA used for studies on human health and stuff.

Braden Tierney:

So we're gonna go there, we're gonna dig up some plants and we're gonna take, like I did, an ag biome. We're gonna dig up, look at the microbes that live in the desert plants and see if they can help with moon-like and or desert stress, which is a great example of like, I think an aim that is relevant to the big crazy, let's go explore space stuff, but also to like helping plants tolerate desertification on earth. Right, you can find a microbe that that they can do both. I think the reason why I love focusing on space is because it's this big, hopeful dream and its exploration at its core. But I want to focus specifically on those nodes that are like, relevant to that will help people on earth. Right, and that's kind of the you'll notice our projects flock that line.

Dan Goodwin:

I love it. I well, I just love that you find such weird niches. I think that's almost part of those. Like part of your skillset is just finding these incredibly unique places. And it's also just beautiful when you hear about your work.

Dan Goodwin:

It feels like the pure academics that we sometimes dream about, but then combined with an eye for deployment, and so I would just kind of love to hear your perspective on how you solve this kind of dual difficulty with climate biotech. It's like people won't fund it until the science works, but then the science won't work if there's no funding. And then people always ask well, what do you deploy it as? And so the simple way I would say it is like look, climate biotech is hard in science and business. We can do it, but we just all have to have our kind of our unique strategies for how to do that. Two Frontiers in itself is so unique, and I love how lean and how much you do with such a small, tight team. I'm just kind of curious, as Two Frontiers grows, how you think about that and how you guys want to see yourselves growing.

Braden Tierney:

Yeah, okay, that's a great question and thank you for asking it. So, if you remember, we started this conversation with a point about like learning skills instead of like having a passion and solving it. The principle of Two Frontiers is that. Yeah, it has a weird name, it's like kind of hard to explain. It's academic on the surface, but that's because we're focusing on building scientific expertise in a way that will like solving medium-term questions that we know have to be answered to actually address climate problems.

Braden Tierney:

Quite frankly, I don't think climate biotech with a few exciting exceptions recently actually, but in general it's not at a point where we can like start a company, make a product and solve it.

Braden Tierney:

But it's also like the problem is too urgent for academics to just kind of noodle away for 100 years, which is how long it takes for, say, a discovery to a drug to be developed, and so you kind of need this short, long, medium term vision that if we nail them in a way that can compete on the metrics of academia and in some ways, industry will generate the toolkit we need to solve the climate problem, and other people have to carry that forward.

Braden Tierney:

We're going to work with them and spin it out, and so that's a big kind of nebulous, squishy answer, but it sort of links together. Like we're at 2FP, we want to learn the trade of doing this. It's like instead of investing in a pastor and we're investing in deep expertise. How do we optimize carbon capture on a microbial level for all these different applications? How do we build bioreactors that can do X, y, z? How do we generate this database of microbial data and culturomics information? And then, since, from day one, we're thinking about the relevance of the application, it's just a unique, interesting area to walk in.

Dan Goodwin:

Got it All right. So we're getting close to time. I'm going to ask you a hard question. An easy question, Hard question. I love your focus on skills. An undergrad is listening to this. What is the first skill that you look for when you're evaluating talent?

Braden Tierney:

Oh, that's another one where it's. I wish I could give some like concrete. I want you to be able to write this object oriented programming.

Dan Goodwin:

It's like you know it's guns to your head. Tell me one skill that when you see somebody do this well, you think that person knows biology or that person is useful on my team.

Braden Tierney:

I think it's. If I ask you the question what's the most interesting scientific paper or podcast or thing you've encountered in the past two weeks, you should have a good answer. That means you're curious, you're learning, you're thinking and engaging with new material. And if I followed up with what's the most interesting thing you've read in the last year, I would hope. That is very different, a different field even than the two week answer. That indicates diversity of thought and pursuit of curiosity. I want to see people who are going in all directions. That matters so much more to me than any individual skill or anything like that.

Dan Goodwin:

And I think to land on this like the easy question, which is that how do people find your work and how do we support you?

Braden Tierney:

At 2FP, we're always looking for mission aligned partners. So you know, we focus on building core technology to solve major problems. If you're a funder who feels that academia is moving too slowly in the wrong direction and-backed biotech has yet to really develop cost-effective products or whatever it is, or you're a scientist who wants to work on those core technologies, or you're someone who wants to spin out something we've done into a company, I say reach out, you're the kind of people I want to work with. You know we want to find people who are really aligned on this axis of doing science in a different and highly impactful way. People who have seen science fail, who are coming at it from a point of humility and who are just excited and curious. So you know, go to our website, ping me at braden at twofrontiersorg. I would absolutely love to chat with anyone who falls into those categories.

Dan Goodwin:

It's funny how humility comes with a bit of failure too.

Braden Tierney:

Yeah.

Dan Goodwin:

So that's great. There's a lot more to say, but I want to be respectful of your time. I think this has been an amazing conversation, Braden. I really love what you do in the world and how you do it. I think it's a breath of fresh air into the field and I think it pushes on the way we do science right. I think Two Frontiers Project is a great example of what a very tight team working with the right of ambition and focus can do, and so we're just cheering for you. In terms of the open data sets, we can find them on the existing platforms. Is that right?

Braden Tierney:

You can find any data we've published or talked about publicly available on platforms. By the end of this year we're going to have a portal on our own site. We're going to revamp the whole website. It's going to make a lot more sense and be a little more streamlined and that'll have everything you need for accessing data, resources and projects and volunteer and ideas and donations and all that stuff.

Dan Goodwin:

Braden Tierney, thank you so much for taking your time and sharing all your work with us. And sharing all your work with us, we really appreciate it.

Braden Tierney:

Well, thank you, it's a pleasure to chat and I really, really appreciate it. It's very fun.

Dan Goodwin:

Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Climate Biotech Podcast. We hope this has been educational, inspirational and fun for you as you navigate your own journey and bring the best of biotech into planetary scale solutions. We'll be back with another one soon and in the meantime, stay in touch with Homeworld Collective on LinkedIn, twitter or Blue Sky. Links are all in the show notes. Huge thanks to our producer, dave Clark, associate producer Arya Natarajan and operations lead, paul Himmelstein, for making these episodes happen. Catch you on the next one.