Cultivarium

Cultivarium develops open-source tools aimed at expanding access to novel microorganisms, inspiring new research avenues, and advancing biotechnology. The company’s mission focuses on making non-model microbes more accessible by creating tools that reduce the time, labor, and cost associated with current bottlenecks. Among its innovations is the POSSUM Toolkit, which identifies functional plasmids for non-model bacteria using a combinatorial approach to test multiple plasmids simultaneously in a single sample. This toolkit is available through Addgene, with its protocol openly accessible on BioRxiv. Cultivarium also provides a portal that aggregates comprehensive information, data, and publications for bacteria, fungi, archaea, and protists, including culture, sequencing, and molecular data. The portal serves as a one-stop-shop for organism-related information, methods, and community feedback. Additionally, Cultivarium offers plasmid libraries, computational tools like MicrobeMod for methylation calling and GenomeSPOT for predicting growth conditions, and genome engineering methods. The company has announced a collaboration with ATCC to expand the repertoire of microbes available for the bioeconomy and make more microorganisms genetically tractable to the life science community. Cultivarium’s tools are designed to minimize trial-and-error time in new species and are released as open-source data, protocols, and tools. The POSSUM Toolkit has been successfully tested on extremophile bacteria, identifying working plasmids for species where none were previously reported.