This article was taken from the February 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Can a dog's poo smell rosy? Tel Aviv-based Omri Amirav-Drory thinks so. He's working with biotechnologist Gilad Gome of Miroculus on Petomics, a pet-probiotic that makes their mess less nasty.
Amirav-Drory's previous work, the Glowing Plant Project (accepted by seed-fund accelerator Y Combinator in August 2014), gives living flora radiance by inserting bioluminescent genes into their DNA. "No one else was trying it," he says.
Amirav-Drory and his friend Antony Evans raised $484,000 (£300,000) for the project, which is now a spinoff company. His day job, as CEO and founder of Genome Compiler, allows biologists to design DNA sequences. "More than 10,000 people from academia and biotech use our platform," he says. "You order DNA to be printed and shipped to you for use in any organism or experiment."
The point of the side projects, he says, is to show that synthetic biology can be fun. "Sometimes it's the quirky projects rather than the ones creating lifesaving drugs that can educate people and get them excited about the power of biology."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
