Latest News on TechBio 🍓
📙 Basecamp Research, New Atlantis Labs, and Blue Economy
Basecamp Research announced on June 11, 2025 the discovery of over 1️⃣ million new species as part of BaseDataTM, the world’s largest biological protein sequence database (of new biological protein sequences: roughly 9️⃣. 8️⃣ billion), and the first to be purpose-built to power the next era of generative biology (Basecamp Research Announces Breakthrough Discovery of Over One Million New Species, Yielding Enormous New Database Purpose-Built for Generative Foundation Models in Biology). Once redundant sequences are removed, BaseData is currently over 1️⃣0️⃣x bigger than all public databases combined and It continues to grow rapidly.
Basecamp Research has broken through this data wall by pioneering an economic partnership-based model that incentivises the collection of samples across the planet’s most extreme and biodiverse environments, working with 1️⃣2️⃣5️⃣+ communities in 2️⃣6️⃣ countries. More specifically, Basecamp Research (2019, UK) is a biotechnology company that partners with R&D teams to develop proteins that meet their most challenging requirements in applications as food, pharma and bioremediation. Having sampled from most extreme and extraordinary biomes on the planet, their knowledge graph of natural biodiversity is the most comprehensive and diverse in existence. This data advantage allows them to rapidly develop AI models.
On March 12, 2024, Basecamp Research announced the launch of BaseFold, its new deep learning model that predicts 3D structures of large, complex proteins more accurately than other AI-powered tools, including the industry gold standard, AlphaFold2 (IMPROVING ALPHAFOLD2 PERFORMANCE WITH A GLOBAL METAGENOMIC & BIOLOGICAL DATA SUPPLY CHAIN). Furthermore, Basecamp Research will be working with NVIDIA to optimize and productionize BaseFold for NVIDIA BioNeMo. On June 18, 2024, Basecamp Research partnered with the Ferruz Laboratory at the Institute of Molecular Biology of Barcelona to unveil ZymCTRL ("enzyme control"). Modeled after LLMs like ChatGPT, ZymCTRL allows users to generate new enzyme sequences simply by inputting an enzyme identification code, specifying the desired activity (Basecamp Research and Ferruz Laboratory Announce ZymCTRL: A Revolutionary AI Tool for Enzyme Design).
Basecamp Research is a blue 🌊⛵🐟🐠 economy biotechnology company.
According to the World Bank, the blue economy is the
"sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods and jobs while preserving the health of the ocean ecosystem."
Other Blue TechBio Companies are:
🦞 New Atlantis Labs, marine metagenomics
NewAtlantis (US)—dedicated to marine biodiversity and marine metagenomics for saving our oceans and preserving marine biodiversity—is about to quantify marine biodiversity 🐠 🪸 with open meta omics to power sustainable and scalable ocean regeneration.
You can explore ➡️ here New Atlantis’ new data app and tools:
Data Explorer (Metagenomics Data),
MicroCosm Analytics (Precision Meta-Omics Data Analytics for Complex Microbiomes),
The platform addresses a critical scientific challenge: extracting functional significance from the vast genomic complexity of marine microbial communities, which represent over 90% of ocean biomass yet remain largely uncharacterized at the functional level. As a foundational component of NewAtlantis Labs' PISCES marine intelligence ecosystem, their approach leverages genome-resolved metagenomics to simultaneously capture taxonomic diversity, metabolic potential, and ecological relationships across all biological kingdoms—from viruses to prokaryotes to microbial eukaryotes.
Poseidon Analytics (Marine Conservation Intelligence Dashboard),
Built upon a sophisticated, multi-modal Marine Food Web Knowledge Graph, initially integrating the foundational global meta-food web dataset from Albouy et al. (2019), Poseidon Analytics provides a powerful engine to:
Unify Diverse Datasets: Seamlessly connect global food web data, species traits, geographic distributions, environmental factors, and potentially human pressures (i.e., fishing intensity) into a single, queryable structure.
Reveal Hidden Connections: Go beyond conventional ecological metrics to explore complex, multi-step relationships and identify vulnerabilities or resilience factors that emerge from the network's structure.
Generate Actionable Intelligence: Answer nuanced questions relevant to real-world conservation decisions.
Proteus (Multi objective protein optimization through AI-guided directed evolution),
ProtScout (AI-driven protein functional characterization and ranking),
ProtScout, is NAL's proprietary AI toolkit for rapid in silico functional characterization and ranking of protein sequences.
cGEN-Forge (Microbial Community Metabolic Modeling and Analysis).
cGEM-forge is an automated, containerized pipeline designed to translate metagenomic data into functional insights about community metabolism. Starting from Metagenome-Assembled Genomes (MAGs) and their relative abundance information derived from datasets like the one from Monterey Bay, this workflow performs several key steps:
Builds individual Genome-Scale Metabolic Models (GEMs): Creates a metabolic network model for each MAG based on its genomic potential.
Assembles a Community GEM (cGEM): Integrates individual models into a single community model, considering MAG abundances and defined environmental nutrient conditions. The specific community model demonstrated in this app was constructed using the MAGs detailed below, selected for their potential predictive power of Net Primary Production (NPP) during the bloom.