Meeting created at: 8th Sep, 2026 - 3:22 PM1
Luke McKay: I think that every time we make a discovery in microbial ecology and we know so little, we're making discoveries all the time about new modes of life, new metabolisms, you start to realize that there's so many different opportunities for life to exist.
Flo Lumsden: Welcome to Talk Bio to Me, the show where we sit down with the people building the future of biology.
Flo Lumsden: I'm your host, Flo Lumsden, founder of Korus Studios, a podcast production company where we transform complex technologies and breakthrough ideas into human stories that educate, entertain and inspire.
Flo Lumsden: This year we headed to Synbio Beta, the world's largest conference for synthetic biology.
Flo Lumsden: This mini pod features some of the most fascinating founders.
Luke McKay: We make spores that actually eat the insects.
Flo Lumsden: Scientists.
Luke McKay: We have carbon fixing microbes that can essentially eat emissions.
Flo Lumsden: Researchers.
Luke McKay: This is going to make DNA into a programmable material that we can use to turn biology into infrastructure investors.
Luke McKay: Because it's garbage in, garbage out on AI.
Luke McKay: And Mother Nature still works in mysterious ways.
Flo Lumsden: Right?
Flo Lumsden: And AI innovators.
Luke McKay: I'm increasingly excited about AI actually making.
Flo Lumsden: An impact in the lab, shaping the future of biotech.
Flo Lumsden: From breakthrough therapies to AI that's beginning to design biology.
Flo Lumsden: I discovered one of the most exciting technological revolutions of our time.
Flo Lumsden: Okay, Talk Bio to Me.
Flo Lumsden: Welcome Luke, to Talk Bio to Me.
Flo Lumsden: So great to have you here today.
Luke McKay: So great to be here.
Flo Lumsden: Give me a little introduction, your name and what you do at your current company.
Luke McKay: I'm Luke McKay, CTO co founder at Simbi Bio S Y M B I Bio and we essentially for the biomanufacturing industry, we do very fast turnaround on omics analysis.
Luke McKay: So that's DNA RNA type analysis to understand what's going on in their system.
Luke McKay: So we deliver that to them if they don't have it already.
Flo Lumsden: I was looking at your website and I didn't see anything about DNA and rna.
Flo Lumsden: I saw more like industrial processing analysis and real time insights.
Luke McKay: Yeah, that's actually a really good point.
Luke McKay: I think it probably says DNA on there somewhere, I'm not sure, but it's actually a big problem in the industry of biomanufacturing because you have a lot of companies out there that are trying to make something with biology, biomanufacturing.
Luke McKay: Right.
Luke McKay: And their systems are running these different types of fermentations or production systems and they're monitoring that process via a number of different methods and analytics.
Luke McKay: But most of those methods are chemical measurements.
Luke McKay: They're measuring the metabolites being produced or the ph or physical measurements like temperature, things like that.
Luke McKay: And they're not actually measuring the biology, which is the core technology of this industry.
Luke McKay: It's the biology that's making the thing.
Flo Lumsden: Right.
Luke McKay: And so people are blind to the core technology.
Luke McKay: They're seeing kind of the aftermath of what the biology did.
Luke McKay: We feel at SIMB Bio that understanding the biology as fast as you can, as close to real time as possible, is very important.
Luke McKay: It's like a missing data point that Kino1 has.
Luke McKay: And it's a very complex type of data, so you have to analyze it in multiple different ways to really understand it well, and that's what we do.
Flo Lumsden: Cool.
Flo Lumsden: So that's the problem you're solving.
Flo Lumsden: You're creating deeper biological, real time insights.
Luke McKay: Exactly.
Flo Lumsden: To biomanufacture, bioindustrial processes.
Flo Lumsden: Yes.
Luke McKay: Nailed it.
Flo Lumsden: I feel so smart.
Luke McKay: You are so smart.
Flo Lumsden: I'm getting smarter and smarter every day I'm here in this area.
Luke McKay: Oh, I bet.
Luke McKay: Me too, actually.
Flo Lumsden: Yeah.
Luke McKay: Every conversation.
Luke McKay: I mean, you're having a lot of.
Flo Lumsden: Conversations, so that makes sense.
Flo Lumsden: So DNA and RNA is obviously part of biological processes that you would be.
Luke McKay: Yeah, exactly.
Luke McKay: So it's essentially, you know, you can think of it as what we're trying to do is build a window into the bioreactor, the industrial bioreactor.
Luke McKay: Bioreactor.
Luke McKay: At any scale, really.
Luke McKay: We work industrial scale bioreactors, but we're happy to apply this to any scale.
Luke McKay: But basically building a window so folks can track and see what's happening to their biology over time.
Luke McKay: Now, that might include like a contaminating microbe that's jumped into your production system that you are blind to and you don't know about it until it's too late and you have to shut down your system and clean everything.
Luke McKay: But if you could detect that earlier, it would really help out a lot of companies.
Luke McKay: Or it could be that you have a single strain in your reactor and you want to track how it's evolving over time.
Luke McKay: So is that production strain that you're using to make whatever you're making, is it actually evolving?
Luke McKay: A lot of people don't know this part, but oftentimes what's in your reactor is not what you think is in your reactor.
Luke McKay: And there are multiple strains, like, existing in parallel at the same time in a reactor.
Luke McKay: And tracking how those are evolving is very useful to people.
Flo Lumsden: Wow, that sounds really cool.
Flo Lumsden: I wish we could like make animation of this so I could understand it even better.
Flo Lumsden: Because it sounds such a micro scale, right?
Flo Lumsden: Yeah, maybe we'll do that.
Luke McKay: If you figure that out.
Luke McKay: Can we put it on our website.
Flo Lumsden: Yeah, that would be really help if I figure out how to visualize this.
Flo Lumsden: No, I think we good, you know, little streams of DNA finding the ones you did lower there.
Luke McKay: Well, speaking of visualization, we also have built a user facing dashboard.
Luke McKay: So that's one thing that we offer to our clients is a system that they can have access to monitor this.
Flo Lumsden: Right.
Flo Lumsden: To make it easier to understand and.
Luke McKay: Yeah, and we have like our boilerplate tools that we've already built, but we also build custom tooling for each customer.
Luke McKay: So depending on what they're looking for, if they're.
Luke McKay: There's a particular gene they're very interested in, we can put a marker on that gene that's like, let's track this one computationally over time and build basically like a visualization, a plot that shows how that one's changing over time.
Flo Lumsden: Got it.
Flo Lumsden: So you've got your out of the box solution and then you've got your customized option.
Flo Lumsden: Yep, very cool.
Flo Lumsden: So let's take a step back, Luke.
Flo Lumsden: Okay.
Flo Lumsden: When I first met you through my friend Marietta, you were studying the potential of alien life in Hot Springs.
Flo Lumsden: So I'm.
Flo Lumsden: I don't have it right.
Luke McKay: That's very close.
Flo Lumsden: Okay.
Flo Lumsden: Give us a little journey from your work in working in some of the most remote, obscure parts of the earth to what you're doing now.
Luke McKay: Yeah, sure, absolutely.
Luke McKay: So I had the extreme privilege to focus on extremophiles in my career, which means organisms, microbes that live in very extreme conditions.
Luke McKay: And the reason that's a privilege to be able to do that is that means you get to go to a lot of very cool places or hot places.
Luke McKay: So I've done research at the bottom of the ocean, hydrothermal vents, gone down in The Alvin submersible 2000 meters to visit hydrothermal vents and collect samples.
Flo Lumsden: You're very brave.
Luke McKay: And yeah.
Flo Lumsden: In the name of science.
Luke McKay: Yeah.
Luke McKay: I feel like though my nerd brain overtook my like claustrophobic brain.
Luke McKay: Total like I'm so excited to go take these samples.
Luke McKay: I didn't even think about like the danger aspects which they're very safe on the Alvin.
Luke McKay: They know what they're doing.
Luke McKay: So I felt in good hands.
Luke McKay: But I spent time in Antarctica, Western Antarctic Peninsula.
Luke McKay: My postdoc I did at Montana State University and studied hot spring microbiology in Yellowstone.
Luke McKay: Also did Deepwater Horizon oil spill was on the very first research cruise to take samples of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill just like a week after the explosion.
Flo Lumsden: Wow.
Luke McKay: That was in 2010.
Luke McKay: All of that said, going to all of these places, these really interesting ecosystems, I've learned a lot about diversity of life on our planet.
Luke McKay: You know, there are over some estimate 3 trillion different microbial species on the planet.
Luke McKay: And within each of those, that's a species level classification.
Luke McKay: Within each of that, there's substrain or subspecies and substrain diversity and evolution happening.
Luke McKay: Within that's really fascinates me.
Luke McKay: And not only in sort of the taxonomic diversity, but also the metabolic diversity.
Luke McKay: And so getting back to aliens, favorite thing.
Flo Lumsden: Let's get back to the aliens.
Luke McKay: Exactly.
Luke McKay: Everyone wants to get back to the aliens.
Luke McKay: I did a postdoc, like I said, at Montana State University, but it was funded by the NASA astrobiology program and astrobiology, space biology, space life, aliens.
Luke McKay: So basically, the idea behind astrobiology is to understand the origin and evolution of life on our planet and also the extension of life beyond our planet and could it exist elsewhere.
Luke McKay: And so oftentimes folks will study extreme ecosystems on Earth to understand the boundary conditions within which life can exist on other planets, planetary bodies, other systems.
Flo Lumsden: Right.
Luke McKay: So that's what I was doing.
Flo Lumsden: Did we get any closer to discovering how aliens could live on other planets?
Luke McKay: Yeah, I think so.
Luke McKay: Yeah.
Luke McKay: I think that every time we make a discovery in microbial ecology and we know so little, we're making discoveries all the time about new modes of life, new metabolisms, you start to realize that there's so many different opportunities for life to exist.
Luke McKay: And there's this thing to jump into some jargon, redox chemistry, oxidation, reduction chemistry.
Luke McKay: And a great professor, a friend of mine, Alfred Sporman at Stanford, he always used to drill into our heads, I didn't go to Stanford.
Luke McKay: I went to a, like, accelerated Hopkins microbiology course there.
Luke McKay: He used to say all the time of that course, life is redox chemistry.
Luke McKay: And so it's all about finding a pathway for moving electrons around.
Luke McKay: And if you can find a molecule that really wants to give away its electrons, and then couple that with a molecule that really wants to take electrons, then you sit right in the middle, and that's an electrical pathway, that's a conductive, that's a pathway for life, so then life can harness that power and live.
Luke McKay: So there's so many ways to do that.
Luke McKay: And we're constantly discovering different molecular combinations that do that.
Flo Lumsden: That is so cool.
Flo Lumsden: And my brain is going to be three times bigger after this conference.
Flo Lumsden: I'm going to be like, I know about what creates life and it has to do with electron.
Flo Lumsden: Did you know that people are going to be like, no, perfect.
Luke McKay: Yeah, that's the way people should think of.
Luke McKay: Definitely.
Flo Lumsden: Okay, so you were doing that amazing research and then you ended up at Lens Attack.
Luke McKay: That's right, yeah.
Luke McKay: So in 2021, I was an assistant research professor at Montana State University.
Luke McKay: I left that position to do computational biology at Lanzatech.
Luke McKay: Lanzatec is a really cool company.
Luke McKay: Lanza in Spanish is Spear.
Luke McKay: They have spearheaded this technology, gas fermentation to ethanol technology, and actually scaled it up to the industrial scale.
Luke McKay: So they use bacteria called Clostridia.
Luke McKay: And that bacterium can ferment waste, carbon gases, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and convert that to ethanol.
Luke McKay: The ethanol can be sold or used to make many things.
Luke McKay: And so they're really one of the first companies that was able to scale up that type of technology all the way to the industrial scale.
Luke McKay: And so I was working for them, doing a lot of stuff for them.
Luke McKay: I worked there for four years and after that myself and actually several of my former colleagues at Lanzatech formed the company Sembee.
Flo Lumsden: Cool.
Flo Lumsden: And you're taking some of your learnings from your time at Linzatech and applying them to your new.
Luke McKay: Yes.
Luke McKay: Yeah, yeah.
Luke McKay: So I've been working in computational biology and bioinformatics to study microbial systems community strains for a very long time, since I started grad school in 2008.
Luke McKay: And I will say that most of that was, you know, until I went to Lanzatech, it was very academic work and studying these environmental systems ecosystems.
Luke McKay: And then really what I learned at Lanzatech is kind of building out those same sort of tools and applying them to industrial biomanufacturing.
Luke McKay: But all the way through the scale up process from like benchtop experiments to piloting to industrial scale commercially launched systems.
Flo Lumsden: It must have been really cool to go from like working in the lab or working in the academic environment and then working to apply it in the real world to do carbon capture technology and do this really cool, innovative process that's ecologically sound.
Flo Lumsden: Was really fulfilling.
Luke McKay: It was fulfilling.
Luke McKay: When I made the decision to leave academia, I really loved what I did.
Luke McKay: The extremophiles, her biology.
Luke McKay: It was really cool.
Flo Lumsden: Is there a documentary about that somewhere or like in the news?
Luke McKay: Yes.
Flo Lumsden: How do we find that?
Luke McKay: Well, there I was in a movie called the Most Unknown and it tracks.
Luke McKay: It was produced by Vice Motherboard and Science Sandbox or Sandbox Films.
Luke McKay: I think it's the National Academy of Science.
Luke McKay: Affiliation I believe in that documentary they track.
Luke McKay: They follow nine scientists.
Luke McKay: It's a feature length documentary and they're studying the most unknown things that science still has yet to understand.
Luke McKay: So are there aliens?
Luke McKay: Where did we come from?
Luke McKay: What is time?
Luke McKay: What is dark matter?
Luke McKay: What is consciousness?
Luke McKay: All of these like big questions and they're following experts throughout that.
Luke McKay: But it's like speed dating where one of those scientists meets another one of those and then tells them about what they're working on.
Flo Lumsden: I feel like I saw a bunch of clips about it when it came out and I don't remember if I watched the whole thing or not.
Flo Lumsden: It sounds like something I would have watched.
Luke McKay: Yeah, probably.
Flo Lumsden: I probably watched it.
Luke McKay: Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: I don't want to watch it again.
Luke McKay: Yeah.
Luke McKay: There's also shorts like each scientist 10 minute feature is also its own independent 10 minute YouTube video.
Luke McKay: So you can watch it there as well.
Luke McKay: I think that one for me is called Searching for Alien Life in the Hot Springs of Nevada or something like that.
Flo Lumsden: Okay.
Luke McKay: Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: Well, we need to have a longer podcast episode where we go maybe even deeper.
Flo Lumsden: But thank you so much for your time today.
Luke McKay: Absolutely.
Luke McKay: Thank you for having me.
Flo Lumsden: You're so welcome.
Flo Lumsden: Good luck on everything.
Luke McKay: Thank you.
Flo Lumsden: Don't forget to subscribe or follow talk bio to me on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube today for episodes dropping very soon.