Friedberg states gut microbiome research has grown geometrically as DNA sequencing costs have dropped dramatically.
“So the number of papers on the gut biome has kind of grown geometrically last couple years.”
Friedberg explains why biologicals 1.0 had poor hit rates due to indiscriminate application across different soil ecosystems.
“And so the hit rate for biologicals one point zero in the way that they were being sold in the traditional input cycle inputs model, not very good.”
Friedberg identifies multiplex precision gene editing, soil metagenomics, and biologics as next transformation opportunities in agriculture.
“I do think that there's going be some big opportunities for the next transformation in agriculture in multiplex precision gene editing and in, metagenomics in the soil microbiome, even in breakthroughs in biologics or other platforms that can discover the next, set or the next range of biologics.”
“So what's happened in biologicals is historically input companies would try and inoculate microbes or get them to grow that they were grabbing from the environment.”
Friedberg says resistant starch permanently changes gut microbiome, unlike probiotics, which motivated starting Super Gut.
“And so it is an absolute game changer in terms of, like, having a permanent lasting effect in changing your gut. That's why we started the company. And so that was a couple years ago.”
Friedberg states there are more bacteria in the gut than cells in the body affecting health outcomes.
“So there's more bacteria living in our gut than there are cells in our body.”
Friedberg states there are more bacteria in the human gut than cells in the body with profound health effects.
“So there's more bacteria living in our gut than there are cells in our body. The human gut, as you guys know, has all these bacteria that can have a profound effect on your health,”
Friedberg explains DNA sequencing advances in the 1990s enabled first identification of bacterial populations in environments.
“in the '90s is kind of when DNA sequencing got cheap enough that we started to be able to figure out what bacteria are in an environment because before that, we didn't really have the ability to do that. So DNA sequencing lets us look at the DNA of all the bacteria,”