Luke McKay is CTO and co-founder of synbi.bio, a company giving the biomanufacturing industry something it's been missing: real-time visibility into the biology actually doing the work inside industrial bioreactors. Most companies monitoring fermentation and production systems are tracking chemical byproducts — pH, temperature, metabolites — but flying blind on the microbes themselves. Luke and his team built the tools to close that gap, catching things like contamination or strain drift before they become expensive shutdowns.

But before symbi,bio, Luke's career took him to some of the most extreme environments on Earth: 2,000 meters down in the Alvin submersible to sample hydrothermal vents, the Western Antarctic Peninsula, Yellowstone's hot springs, and the first research cruise out to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill just a week after the explosion. His NASA-funded postdoc research into astrobiology — studying extremophiles to understand where and how life could exist elsewhere in the universe — eventually led him to LanzaTech, where he applied his microbial ecology background to scaling up gas fermentation (turning waste carbon into ethanol) at industrial scale.

In this conversation, Luke breaks down what synbi.bio actually does, why "life is redox chemistry," and how a career studying alien-adjacent microbiology led to solving a very practical, very Earthbound industrial problem.

Guest: Luke McKay, CTO & Co-Founder, symbi-bio
Connect with Luke on Linkedin.

Mentioned in this episode:

• LanzaTech (gas fermentation to ethanol technology)
• The Most Unknown (documentary, produced by Vice Motherboard, Science Sandbox/Sandbox Films)
• SynBioBeta conference

We all know how unpopular data centers are, especially when it comes to energy consumption and environmental concerns. As AI and cloud computing continue to explode, the problem is only getting worse. But what if the solution to the energy crisis was hiding in.. biology?! Specifically DNA.

In this episode, Flo sits down with Anagha Rajesh founder of Biocompute, at SynBioBeta, to explore how DNA could revolutionize data storage.

We dive into:

• How DNA actually works as a storage medium
• Why natural DNA beats synthetic DNA for this application
• The surprising supply chain challenges of building biotech hardware
• Biocompute's ambitious 2026 roadmap: getting DNA storage out of the lab and into real data centers
• Why Anagha chose to build at the intersection of biology and commercialization

If you're curious about the future of computing, sustainability, or biotech startups, this conversation will blow your mind.

More about our guest: Anagha holds a Masters in Chemistry, and was a gene therapy researcher before she started BioCompute. Her startup takes a breakthrough approach to encoding data in DNA which is 70,000x cheaper than that of her competitors. She is the co-author of the world's first comprehensive book on DNA Data Storage published by Springer Nature, and has raised capital from stalwarts in the field. Watch her Tedx Talk!
Connect with Anagha on Linkedin

Learn more about BioCompute: https://www.biocomputeinc.com/

Thank you to SynBioBeta for hosting me this year!
Learn about SynBioBeta: https://www.synbiobeta.com/

(Recently featured in The New York Times.) What happens when you train an AI model not on the internet, but on millions of genomes? Samuel King, a PhD candidate at Stanford, working at the intersection of AI and bioengineering, joins host Flo Lumsden to unpack it — including how his team used AI to generate the first fully functional bacteriophage genome from scratch, and why that could mean far more targeted treatments for antibiotic-resistant infections.

They also get into the designer baby question and what makes a PhD less narrow than people assume.

Recorded live at SynBioBeta 2026, where the scientists, the machine learning crowd, and (increasingly) the compute giants all show up to compare notes.

About Samuel King:
Samuel King is a Ph.D. candidate in Bioengineering at Stanford University and the Arc Institute. His current research aims to advance human and planet health by leveraging large language models trained on DNA for biological discovery and design. He previously co-founded a genomics biotech start-up and received an M.S. from Stanford and B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia.

Connect with Samuel:
Website
Linkedin