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| Image created by Dr. Michael J. Miller |
FREDsense Technologies Corp, a water quality platform company, and Ginkgo Bioworks, a synthetic cellular biology company, today announced a partnership to build biosensors for water quality monitoring and detection.
Through this partnership, Ginkgo seeks to build four distinct microbial strain biosensors, compatible with FREDsense's field-ready hardware for remote water quality monitoring applications.
Water quality has become a growing environmental and public health concern, increasing the demand for scalable monitoring and testing systems. With conventional water quality tests, transporting samples to labs for chemical analysis can lead to lengthy delays in reporting. Some companies, like FREDsense, work to offer portable solutions that allow for rapid feedback without the need for external lab equipment.
"Water is our most critical resource, and we now have the technology to detect in real-time many of the threats or contaminants that can impact the water that our environments and communities depend on," says David Lloyd, CEO of FREDsense. "Through this partnership with Ginkgo, we aim to introduce rapid, simple, and accurate testing to deliver water quality monitoring systems to those that most need it. We believe that synthetic biology is the key to solving some of the biggest challenges facing the water industry globally and are very excited to partner with Ginkgo on this vision."
The biosensors in development by Ginkgo aim to enable real-time field detection of harmful molecules, and may be used to generate solutions for groundwater and industrial water management systems.
"Partnering with FREDsense is an exciting opportunity to apply Ginkgo's strain development capabilities to powerful biosensor technology for an important application," said Jason Kelly, CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. "Protecting our water sources is a mission critical initiative: life on this planet as we know it depends on it. We're eager to work toward enhancing the capabilities of FREDsense's platform to monitor for harmful contaminants in water."