Pivot Bio is a Southern California based, synthetic biology company working on nitrogen-producing microbes. Funded by major humanitarian-focused foundations and working with long established agricultural-based chemical companies, Pivot Bio also collaborates with environmentalists and Mid-west corn-growing farmers. With a focus on the three crops that together consume half of the worldâs nitrogen - corn, wheat and rice - Pivot Bio is addressing reduction of fertilizer use by enabling effective use of their nitrogen-producing microbes. At the heart of the firm's effort is the premise that modern seeds sown to grow these three crops - and many others - have lost the ability to fix nitrogen because of synthetic fertilizer and its impact on microbes. The scientific challenge was to identify microbes still capable of producing notrogen and then adapting them not to shut down in the presence of synthetic fertilizers but instead to feed the growing plant. With some of Pivot Bio's microbes being used in real life conditions by their cooperating farmers. the data suggests the microbes are meeting a significant percentate of the crop's nitogen needs: a potentially game changing impact.
