The bacteria turning waste plastic into painkiller

A recent BBC feature highlighting the growing need to move beyond traditional “workhorse” microbes like E. coli and explore faster, more capable organisms for the next era of biotechnology. It spotlights Vibrio natriegens—a naturally ultra-fast-growing bacterium with major potential for industrial biomanufacturing and sustainability applications. Forage Evolution, spun out of Cornell University, is building the genetic tools and workflows that make V. natriegens dramatically easier for researchers to engineer and deploy, unlock new possibilities for scalable, efficient, next-generation biotech.