From Probing Alien Life to Bioreactors: Luke McKay on Why Life Is Redox Chemistry

Luke McKay is CTO and co-founder of synbi.bio, a company giving the biomanufacturing industry something it's been missing: real-time visibility into the biology actually doing the work inside industrial bioreactors. Most companies monitoring fermentation and production systems are tracking chemical byproducts — pH, temperature, metabolites — but flying blind on the microbes themselves. Luke and his team built the tools to close that gap, catching things like contamination or strain drift before they become expensive shutdowns.

But before symbi,bio, Luke's career took him to some of the most extreme environments on Earth: 2,000 meters down in the Alvin submersible to sample hydrothermal vents, the Western Antarctic Peninsula, Yellowstone's hot springs, and the first research cruise out to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill just a week after the explosion. His NASA-funded postdoc research into astrobiology — studying extremophiles to understand where and how life could exist elsewhere in the universe — eventually led him to LanzaTech, where he applied his microbial ecology background to scaling up gas fermentation (turning waste carbon into ethanol) at industrial scale.

In this conversation, Luke breaks down what synbi.bio actually does, why "life is redox chemistry," and how a career studying alien-adjacent microbiology led to solving a very practical, very Earthbound industrial problem.

Guest: Luke McKay, CTO & Co-Founder, symbi-bio
Connect with Luke on Linkedin.