Deep Techy Mighty Microbes for Africa

Nadia Shalaby, PhD
Founder & CEO, Pakira, Inc. 
Professional Advisor, MIT Legatum Center

Health Problems at ISS 

“Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are plagued by a variety of infections”, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Why? Because the ISS is too clean – meaning it does not have enough microbes?! Exactly right! The vast diversity of free-living microbes found on Earth, in soil and water, is lacking in the isolated ISS environment. 

Microbes are tiny little factories that have evolved to live in every environment on earth. There are 38-39 trillion microbes in our human bodies, and approximately 30 trillion human cells. Therefore, as humans, we are more microbe than human cells, and this microbial environment, especially in the human gut and colon, is known as microbiome. 

Over the last decade, we started to comprehend the vital degree to which our microbiome affects our health, from digestion, to immune system function, to vitamin synthesis, to protection against pathogens, and even influencing mood and brain function.  This explains many of the health problems astronauts develop aboard ISS. The longer they stay in that microbe-diversity-lacking environment, the sicker they get. 

Mission – Microbes for Good! 

MIT Chemical Engineering Professor Ariel Furst's lab focuses on developing technologies to improve energy equity, environmental equity, and human health equity. The lab develops inexpensive, easy-to-use technologies for human health, environmental remediation, and sustainability. And microbes are the foundation of the lab’s technology platform. 

Microbes support all life on earth. Human life, animal life, and plant life. Plants naturally grow due to their interactions with microbes. Primarily plants need nitrogen to grow, and microbes can convert the atmospheric nitrogen (N₂ constitutes 78% of our atmosphere) from its inert form as a gas, to a solid form plants can use. This process is called nitrogen fixation. Microbes also secrete natural pesticides, thereby protecting plants from pathogens. So, microbes function just like agro-chemicals, except they are much more efficient, cheaper, local in the soil – no import required! 

Problem – Microbes are Fragile 

This means that if we want scalable agriculture (achieved via agro-chemical production) via microbes, we need microbe production at scale as well. But microbes don’t live in isolation. In their natural environments microbes live in communities where they support each other to survive and multiply. If we remove microbes out of their natural environments to scale them for production, they are exposed to all kinds of physical and chemical stressors that kill them. For example: 

• Temperature fluctuations – too hot or too cold
• Pressure variability – too low pressure (eg vacuum) or too high pressure
• Exposure and immersion into non-water liquids

But microbes need to be alive to feed and protect the plants. 

Solution – Mighty Microbes! 

Most cellular processes are based on redox reactions, which are electrons moving between molecules. If an electron is added to a molecule it’s called reduction and if it’s removed from a molecule it’s called oxidation. This is the class of redox reactions. 

Environmental stressors harm microbes primarily via these oxidative or reductive processes, so we need to protect the microbes against these reactions by covering them, as  Ariel Furst describes it, with a suit of armor. 

Using exclusively anti-oxidant compounds, instead of harmful chemicals, the Furst lab invented the process of coating the microbes with Iron (in its Fe³⁺ form) and Tannic Acid (found in coffee and tea), and then adding a base to remove the hydrogen and loose interactions between the OH group, thereby rigidifying the coating. Like an Iron Man suit -- Mighty Microbes! We know the coating rigidified once the color turns from blue to purple.

These Mighty Microbes were added to planted seeds of a variety of crops and consistently produced 150% higher germination compared to the uncoated, fresh microbes. Another type of Mighty Microbes were designed to take atmospheric CO2 from the air, mix it with Calcium, and produce limestone, thereby changing the pH (acidity) of the soil without trucking carbon to it. 

So we now have Mighty Microbes that can be stored and transported, while remaining active and live! 

Agricultural Application in Africa 

As we saw in the previous article “Fertilizer Production & Food Self-Sufficiency in Growth Markets”, the African is in dire need to fill the large gap between fertilizer production and the consumption required to feed its rapidly growing population. Whether importing the fertilizers or building multi-billion dollar large chemical production plants, increases the cost of food, reduces farmers’ net income, and further exacerbates pollution and green house gas release into the atmosphere.  

Contemporaneously, African countries are encouraging their scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs to engage in Deep Tech. Scaling the Mighty Microbes process and setting up production facilities in each region would allow

1. Dramatically reduced production cost by 3 orders of magnitude (millions vs billions of dollars for the same production capacity)
2. Elimination of transportation costs due to local production
3. Farmers gain access to much cheaper fertilizing product with comparable yield benefit – this needs to be tested at scale, over time, and across different crop varieties
4. Ability to control the pH of the soil customizing it for different crop varieties
5. Avoid chemical pollution
6. Learn best manufacturing and planting practices by data collection across the continent in 1000s of locations, and running it via AI models to guide further yields and drive the cost even lower

There are already two startup companies spun out of the Furst Lab in the US, where fertilizers are abundant but organic farmers do not want to use them. Where are the African entrepreneurs? Hamjambo!