Asimov Press Solving the Electroporation Bottleneck
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Jan 15, 2026 Discover how Cultivarium is tackling the challenges of engineering non-model organisms. Niko McCarty delves into the limitations of E. coli dominance in research and the reasons scientists avoid less-studied microbes. Learn the ins and outs of electroporation, a groundbreaking technique that uses electrical pulses for DNA entry. The conversation highlights Cultivarium's innovative robotics that optimize transformation experiments and the significant role of non-model organisms in scientific breakthroughs like PCR and CRISPR.
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Vast Majority Of Microbes Are Unexplored
- Most microbes remain unstudied: roughly 1 trillion species with 99.999% undiscovered.
- This gap implies huge potential for novel biological tools and discoveries.
Combinatorial Search Blocks New Organisms
- Growing and engineering new organisms faces huge combinatorial challenges in media and conditions.
- Failed growth experiments often return little diagnostic information, slowing exploration.
Early Electroporation Breakthroughs
- E. Neumann and Kurt Rosenheck's vesicle experiments showed membranes become permeable but not destroyed when zapped.
- In 1982 Newman tuned pulses and conditions to transform mouse fibroblasts, yielding 95 colonies from one million cells.