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Checkerspot - Building Blocks for New Materials
The potential for new materials and products is vastly underserved across most of our industrial applications. Only 14 fatty acids are used as material building blocks across the majority of industries; however, hundreds of fatty acids exist in nature. The diverse physical and functional properties of millions of products are enabled by these differing building blocks.
Nature has evolved over billions of years to deliver exquisite material building blocks that are unexplored or under-utilized because they don’t fit in the “industrial complex,” that defines itself by commodity scale and pricing. Our technology platform has the potential to enable the design—at the molecular level—of new materials.
We engineer microalgae to produce new molecular building blocks and apply chemistry, creating materials with novel physical properties, and ultimately we build these materials into parts and products we prototype.
Molecular Foundry
We use microbes found in nature that express a diversity of unique and previously untapped molecules to produce “building blocks” for materials. Our initial focus is on triglycerides, also known as oils. Our microbes make these oils through fermentation.
Chemistry & Materials Science
By expanding the palette of available building blocks, we can then apply novel chemistries to create materials with desired physical properties. Our initial focus is on high-performance polyurethanes and coatings made from our biobased oils.
Fabrication
Targeting specific use cases and applications, we design, prototype and test our materials in-use with state of the art manufacturing technologies.
