Fieldstone Bio is building microbes that can sense everything from TNT to arsenic

The world is awash in data about, well, the world — thanks to satellites and environmental sensors. But there’s still a lot we can’t see, and Fieldstone Bio thinks microbes can change that. “They’ve evolved to sense and respond to information. It’s just trillions of calculations going on at all times all around us,” Brandon Fields, Fieldstone Bio’s co-founder and chief science officer, told TechCrunch. “How do we take that and actually manipulate that to gain benefits for us?” Fieldstone’s technology emerged from that question. The startup was founded in 2023 after spinning out of MIT, where professor Chris Voigt’s lab had developed a way to turn microbes into sensors. The scientists programmed the microbes to change color when they encountered something of interest, whether it be nutrients in soil or landmines hidden in the dirt, and then figured out how to detect them. “The key technology out of Chris’ lab is this idea of, ‘How do we actually visualize these cells from really far ... Read full article.