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Core Facility Access Fund: A Cultivar Initiative (Informational Call)
Stephanie Regagnon
Hi, everyone. Can you hear us? How are you Good morning? Hi there. Good morning. Good to see you.
Jesús De la Vega Anchondo
Just can see you.
Stephanie Regagnon
We are going to allow just a few minutes for a few more folks to join, but thrilled to see you all this morning. Applause,
Stephanie Regagnon
I should go on mute. My dogs have been extra spicy this morning. Just not not cool. I
Stephanie Regagnon
Okay, let's give everyone just one more minute, and then we will dive in here. We have quite a bit of information to go over, but I also want to leave plenty of times at the end for questions. So let's give it one more minute. I
Jesús De la Vega Anchondo
Hmm,
Stephanie Regagnon
okay, I will continue allowing folks into the Zoom Room once we get started here. But in the interest of time, let's go ahead and jump in. So first of all, thank you all so much for joining us this morning. I am so excited about what we're going to talk about here today, what we're going to launch here a little bit later this morning, which is the core facility access fund, an initiative of Cultivar which most of you, I believe, know about and have participated in. So it's lovely to have you join today, and I also encourage you to share this with your networks. I'll be posting something on LinkedIn a little later this morning, and I would love it if you all would share that to just spread the word. We want to get lots of good applications. So I am going to have a few minutes of opening comments and then hand it over to a friend and colleague, Katie from the Danforth Plant Science Center. But first, I want to just say that we would like to thank Breakthrough Energy. So Breakthrough Energy is a climate tech fund here in the United States, and they fund fellows, they give ecosystem grants, and they also do direct company support. They reached out to the Danforth center in late 2024 and had heard about the Cultivar initiative, and they wanted to support it, and they wanted to support it in a way that they could help advance Latin American startups in their research. And so we were able to very quickly put together an idea that we think will be really valuable for you all and your networks, and so we're excited to present that today. Also just wanted to remind you, if you haven't been directly in touch with myself or Isabel, we just had a Cultivar community call a few weeks ago, lots of good information on that that we'd be happy to share with you if for some reason, that did not find its way into your inbox. So with that, I am going to introduce Dr Katie Murphy. She is a core facility director at the Danforth Plant Science Center. She's also a principal investigator. She's brilliant. She cares about the community, and she has just a great partner in every sense of the word. And she will be presenting the information about this exact opportunity. And then we want to leave plenty of time for questions at the end. So with that, Katie, I will hand it to you. Thank you,
Katie Murphy
Seth, thank you for the very kind introduction. I'm really excited about this opportunity for all of you. I'm a plant scientists. That's that's sort of my love is doing plant science, and so I'm really excited that there's an opportunity for potentially, us, or my colleagues and you, to work together and advance your technologies and your companies. So let's dive right in. I want to tell you, first a little bit about the Danforth center. I think a lot of you might have been to visit us, and some of you may have even done work with us here before. But just a little bit of background, we're about 400 employees. We represent 30 different home countries. That seems to increase every year as we have people from all over the world who come here to work at the Danforth center. We have 31 scientific teams, and I actually think as of last week, we're now at 33 we have two new teams who just joined us, which is very exciting. And so far, 10 startup companies have actually been launched out of the Danforth center based on Danforth center research that have been spun out. So this is our campus here in St Louis, Missouri. You can see back behind us is the Bridge Park building and the edge at bridge building. So we're really fortunate to have a thriving campus here, with both our research internally, with our internal groups, but also our support of our neighboring ecosystem and the companies nearby. And perhaps a highlight you can see in this image, we could not even capture all of the greenhouses in a single drone picture, because there are so many of them, and that's going to be one of the resources that you can access as part of this opportunity. Okay, so what are the Danforth center core facilities? That's really what we are talking about today. So the core facilities represent six of those research groups that I mentioned earlier. The rest are doing research in their own labs. But our core facilities are a little bit unique, and that's where I come in. So I lead the phenotyping core facility, which you're going to hear more about. But we both do our own research in order to develop new and advanced technologies. But we also have opportunities to serve internal folks here to support them in their research, but as well as external academic users and companies, so folks like yourself. So here's a list of our core facilities. I should say there are seven, but the field research site is not available for this opportunity yet. We're hoping that will be so in future years, but that is a brand new facility, and we're still actively doing construction at the field research site. So everything I'm going to tell you today, you can read a whole lot more info on the website here, if you just search Danforth center cores, there is really 
detailed information about all of the services that are offered, as well as the pricing that's available online. So what is this opportunity? What is the core facility access fund? Well, the goal is to advance Latin American startups by providing access to the resources the core facilities here at the Danforth center, so that funding must be used for core facility services. The size of the award is going to depend on the project. We recognize that some of them might be smaller or cheaper, whereas other ones might be larger. So the and the project should only be three to six months long. We're going to talk in more detail again about some example projects and the services that are being offered. So what are the requirements? And I will not be offended if you drop off the call now, although I hope you'll stay, because you might know some other folks who could be good candidates for this opportunity. But first, the company must be located in Latin America. The company must be a startup. They must have enough product for testing. So if you have an excellent idea, but you haven't yet produced product, unfortunately, that's not a good fit for for this opportunity, because we want to be able to test your product for you, and so you need to have enough of it available for testing. You are responsible for any permits if it's applicable. We're going to talk about that at the end, but there are safety requirements that we have to consider for any work that's done at the Danforth center, and we have to adhere to any permits from either federal agencies like the USDA, the EPA, but as well as any applicable import permits. And then you need to have a technology readiness level between C to F. So what does that mean? It's highlighted on the next slide. So we often describe technology readiness on this scale. So A is, it's just an you know, there's a problem. B is, you're starting to develop a concept. So neither of those are going to be applicable here, because we need something to test with you and for you. So C to F, the ones highlighted here are the ones that we are looking for for this opportunity. Now, the ones that are already commercialized are again, not going to be a good fit, unless you're testing a new application that would put this back in C to F range. These will be available afterwards, so you can look at it in more detail. It's also in detail on the application we're going to share at the end. So then the question is, what? What's available to you? What can you use in these core facilities? And what I'm showing you here is available through this opportunity, where it would be funded through this opportunity, but say, you just want to use these, these facilities with your own funding, all of that is possible as well. So the first, and I would say the most important part of our facilities are the people. It's always the people. None of this work happens without experts in their respective fields. And so the experts are actually available. Their time is available. As part of this opportunity, we also do full service experiments, and that's what would be available here. And by that, it means we are doing almost everything you send us, your your product, your seed, whatever that what is that? Whatever is most applicable to you, and we are going to do all the testing. So we have the technologies, the advanced technologies, and the equipment, and we have the teams that know how to use it. We can help design the experiments that are necessary, care for the plants, grow them with our expert horticulturalists. And then we can analyze data and also visualize it, so that you have plots and conclusions out at the end. So really start to finish one stop shop. Now I'm going to go through what those core facilities are and give you a really brief overview of some of their services. Again, there's a lot more available on the website. So we're going to start with the most popular, I would say, which is our plant growth facility, and this includes both greenhouses. So those that large greenhouse complex you saw, as well as growth chambers, people often ask me, What's the difference? A greenhouse is less controlled. It's a glass house. We do have air conditioned greenhouses, heated greenhouses. They have controlled lighting. But a growth chamber is a more extreme form of control where there is no outside light coming in, we are controlling every aspect, from humidity, like intensity, day length, CO two levels, there's we can get really extreme control inside of a growth chamber. So both of those are available. All of these have automation and control, whether you're in the greenhouse or the growth chamber, and then, importantly, are those experts, so expert horticulturalists, who are taking care of the plants at all times, doing everything from watering to pest control, planting, harvesting, you name it, that team can do it. They're really amazing. I I am an active user of the plant growth facility, and they're a really excellent team. Again, here's just a few of the 
details. In Numbers, there are 50 greenhouses. We're now at 100 different growth chambers, air conditioning, irrigation. Highlight is one that interests a lot of researchers. CO two control the experts, and then they can do they can do everything. You don't have to be on site to care for any of the plants or do any part of the process, all right, next is my wonderful facility, which which I am very fortunate to manage this team and the facility, and that's the phenotyping core facility. So we get to spend a couple extra minutes on this one, because it is, it is my passion. And so what is plant phenotyping is often the question that I get first, so phenotyping is measuring a trait. My phenotype is that I've got pale skin, blue eyes, and I'm about five foot nine, right? So the phenotype of a plant is going to be its size, its health level. There's a lot of things we can we can do by making measurements of plants. This is really critical as you're testing products, if you need to figure out if your product makes plants healthier or grow better, you need to do phenotyping. Almost all plant scientists need to do some form of phenotyping, and we just have some really incredible tools and expertise to do that phenotyping. So the first is our Bellwether facility. This is a large conveyor belt facility I'm going to show you in detail on the next slide, we have some advanced cameras, like the crop reporter system, where you can see things that you can't see with the visible eye. We have the DiTech plant array. So this is actually a system to measure plant water use efficiency. It's excellent for understanding drought stress responses, among 
other stress responses. And then we do all sorts of custom imaging as well custom measurements in order to really take conclusions away from an experiment that you need. So oftentimes, folks will grow plants in our plant growth facility, and then we will take on some of the imaging and the plant phenotyping. So I'm going to show you my favorite facility, my favorite piece of our facility, which is the bellwether facility, and I'm just going to narrate a short video for you here, because it's so much easier to see it in action. In this facility, the plants ride around on a conveyor belt. There are very few of these, actually, in the whole world, there's only a couple of them. Ours was the first in the United States at a non commercial institution. It was installed about 10 years ago. We've now done over 100 experiments, and we've tested over 30 different plant species, so you can see the plants ride around on this conveyor belt, and that allows us an extreme level of control and automation. It holds 1140
+1
detailed information about all of the services that are offered, as well as the pricing that's available online. So what is this opportunity? What is the core facility access fund? Well, the goal is to advance Latin American startups by providing access to the resources the core facilities here at the Danforth center, so that funding must be used for core facility services. The size of the award is going to depend on the project. We recognize that some of them might be smaller or cheaper, whereas other ones might be larger. So the and the project should only be three to six months long. We're going to talk in more detail again about some example projects and the services that are being offered. So what are the requirements? And I will not be offended if you drop off the call now, although I hope you'll stay, because you might know some other folks who could be good candidates for this opportunity. But first, the company must be located in Latin America. The company must be a startup. They must have enough product for testing. So if you have an excellent idea, but you haven't yet produced product, unfortunately, that's not a good fit for for this opportunity, because we want to be able to test your product for you, and so you need to have enough of it available for testing. You are responsible for any permits if it's applicable. We're going to talk about that at the end, but there are safety requirements that we have to consider for any work that's done at the Danforth center, and we have to adhere to any permits from either federal agencies like the USDA, the EPA, but as well as any applicable import permits. And then you need to have a technology readiness level between C to F. So what does that mean? It's highlighted on the next slide. So we often describe technology readiness on this scale. So A is, it's just an you know, there's a problem. B is, you're starting to develop a concept. So neither of those are going to be applicable here, because we need something to test with you and for you. So C to F, the ones highlighted here are the ones that we are looking for for this opportunity. Now, the ones that are already commercialized are again, not going to be a good fit, unless you're testing a new application that would put this back in C to F range. These will be available afterwards, so you can look at it in more detail. It's also in detail on the application we're going to share at the end. So then the question is, what? What's available to you? What can you use in these core facilities? And what I'm showing you here is available through this opportunity, where it would be funded through this opportunity, but say, you just want to use these, these facilities with your own funding, all of that is possible as well. So the first, and I would say the most important part of our facilities are the people. It's always the people. None of this work happens without experts in their respective fields. And so the experts are actually available. Their time is available. As part of this opportunity, we also do full service experiments, and that's what would be available here. And by that, it means we are doing almost everything you send us, your your product, your seed, whatever that what is that? Whatever is most applicable to you, and we are going to do all the testing. So we have the technologies, the advanced technologies, and the equipment, and we have the teams that know how to use it. We can help design the experiments that are necessary, care for the plants, grow them with our expert horticulturalists. And then we can analyze data and also visualize it, so that you have plots and conclusions out at the end. So really start to finish one stop shop. Now I'm going to go through what those core facilities are and give you a really brief overview of some of their services. Again, there's a lot more available on the website. So we're going to start with the most popular, I would say, which is our plant growth facility, and this includes both greenhouses. So those that large greenhouse complex you saw, as well as growth chambers, people often ask me, What's the difference? A greenhouse is less controlled. It's a glass house. We do have air conditioned greenhouses, heated greenhouses. They have controlled lighting. But a growth chamber is a more extreme form of control where there is no outside light coming in, we are controlling every aspect, from humidity, like intensity, day length, CO two levels, there's we can get really extreme control inside of a growth chamber. So both of those are available. All of these have automation and control, whether you're in the greenhouse or the growth chamber, and then, importantly, are those experts, so expert horticulturalists, who are taking care of the plants at all times, doing everything from watering to pest control, planting, harvesting, you name it, that team can do it. They're really amazing. I I am an active user of the plant growth facility, and they're a really excellent team. Again, here's just a few of the +1
details. In Numbers, there are 50 greenhouses. We're now at 100 different growth chambers, air conditioning, irrigation. Highlight is one that interests a lot of researchers. CO two control the experts, and then they can do they can do everything. You don't have to be on site to care for any of the plants or do any part of the process, all right, next is my wonderful facility, which which I am very fortunate to manage this team and the facility, and that's the phenotyping core facility. So we get to spend a couple extra minutes on this one, because it is, it is my passion. And so what is plant phenotyping is often the question that I get first, so phenotyping is measuring a trait. My phenotype is that I've got pale skin, blue eyes, and I'm about five foot nine, right? So the phenotype of a plant is going to be its size, its health level. There's a lot of things we can we can do by making measurements of plants. This is really critical as you're testing products, if you need to figure out if your product makes plants healthier or grow better, you need to do phenotyping. Almost all plant scientists need to do some form of phenotyping, and we just have some really incredible tools and expertise to do that phenotyping. So the first is our Bellwether facility. This is a large conveyor belt facility I'm going to show you in detail on the next slide, we have some advanced cameras, like the crop reporter system, where you can see things that you can't see with the visible eye. We have the DiTech plant array. So this is actually a system to measure plant water use efficiency. It's excellent for understanding drought stress responses, among +1
other stress responses. And then we do all sorts of custom imaging as well custom measurements in order to really take conclusions away from an experiment that you need. So oftentimes, folks will grow plants in our plant growth facility, and then we will take on some of the imaging and the plant phenotyping. So I'm going to show you my favorite facility, my favorite piece of our facility, which is the bellwether facility, and I'm just going to narrate a short video for you here, because it's so much easier to see it in action. In this facility, the plants ride around on a conveyor belt. There are very few of these, actually, in the whole world, there's only a couple of them. Ours was the first in the United States at a non commercial institution. It was installed about 10 years ago. We've now done over 100 experiments, and we've tested over 30 different plant species, so you can see the plants ride around on this conveyor belt, and that allows us an extreme level of control and automation. It holds 1140 Katie Murphy
different 
plants, and does automated weighing of those plants, automated watering, fertilizing, and most importantly, it captures images. So a lot of what our team does is take pictures of plants and then make measurements on those images. You can see here Hui is coming in. This is sitaria, which is a model grass species, and this team is evaluating basically what are the genetic controls of drought stress response in sitaria. So we're going to see it water here in just a second. Here it comes. So here's the automated watering system that allows a really extreme level of control, but also evaluation of how those plants are using water, how their weight is changing over time. Here it goes again. It's going to lift that one up. Give it just a second. I'll tell you the most common question I get, which is, why do the plants move at that speed? Why is, why are the conveyor belts so slow? The answer is, we can control the speed. This is the optimal speed. Otherwise the plants throw themselves off the conveyor belt and it's very unpleasant. So that is the bellwether phenotyping facility. So this is available as part 
of this opportunity. All right, so our next facility that really ties into the previous two is our data science facility. They offer an enormous amount of services. All of them really are not actually touching any of the plants, but are analyzing data. So this includes cloud computing. We typically use Amazon Web Services. They do statistical analysis. They can analyze genomic and transcriptomic data, image analysis, and this is the part really where we partner closely with them, which is that the Plant Growth Facility grows the plants. We take a lot of pictures, and then the data science facility is actually analyzing all of those images in order to collect plant traits. They do microbiome analysis, and they also do software development, so some custom software development. So again, all of these are available and can be used in partnership with the other facilities to analyze data, visualize that data, and really make statistically sound conclusions about what is going on in your scientific experiment. The one I want to highlight specifically is the image analysis. So this is done using plant CV. So this is, again, one of our custom imaging setups here. This uses a Raspberry PI System, which I think this was from my colleague, Malia Guillen. And here we're growing again, sitaria, but we're actually tracking the growth of these plants over time. This is really excellent for understanding germination rates. So which seed is going to germinate first. We can track without having to go in and check on the seed. We can get down to the minute accuracy we prefer to do by the hour of which seed germinates better. And then we can track many traits, over 20 different traits, in collaboration with the data science facility. All right. Next 
on the list, we have our advanced bioimaging lab. So while I take pictures of the whole plant, the advanced bio Imaging Lab is taking pictures of things at the microscopic level, so things you couldn't see with the naked eye. They have an enormous amount of different microscopes down in that facility. And most importantly, they have the expertise and people who really have focused their entire careers on plants, and how do you take images of plants? So we've got these advanced macro microscopy so that means it's much smaller than we can see, but it's not so close that it's on a subcellular level. Confocal microscopy, that's a pretty common technique, but you need the real expertise in plants to make it possible. We then have electron and super resolution microscopy. They can do all everything, including sample preparation as well as image analysis. So again, check out the website if you want to see some details on what specific equipment they have available and examples of publications that have used that equipment. Next, we have the plant transformation facility. And so this is our facility that makes transgenic plants, and this includes gene editing, gene modification, knock in, knock out, lots of different opportunities. So they do everything from full service for people who are here on site, they have self service equipment that means equipment rental that you can use, and they have the experts again to make this all possible. So check out what they have to offer and in which species they have to offer for plant transformation. Next, we have bioanalytical chemistry facility for those of us who have have used the Danforth center before. This was previously called the proteomics and mass spectrometry facility, or pmsf, and recently was renamed because they have significantly expanded their services and what's possible with them. So rather than add on some words to the already long name, we they renamed it to be more inclusive. So this facility includes proteomics, so that's understanding what proteins are present in a sample, for example, in a leaf. Metabolomics, this can be targeted or untargeted. So this is an understanding of what chemical compounds are present in a sample. And now the recent addition is elemental analysis. So this is going to be things like magnesium and calcium and different ions that are present in a sample, and can be really important for understanding plant nutrient responses. And then finally, GCMs. So these are it's another technology that you can use. It's specialized for specific compounds. And of course, the expertise the people to recommend which technology is actually going to be best for your scientific question. GCMs is particularly useful for understanding plant volatiles, so the gasses that plants give off, you can actually find if you're if you come to visit St Louis sometime between now and March of 2026 this facility partnered with the Missouri Botanical Garden in a exhibit at the botanical garden in the SAKs museum to measure and better understand plant volatiles from plants from Madagascar. So that's a fun fact. Okay, those are all of the facilities that are available as part of this opportunity. Let's talk some details and examples of what is included in these projects. So what you can describe in your application is to include the staff time, so the personnel necessary to do everything from designing, executing and analyzing data from your experiments, depending on the project, it's going to depend on what your needs are. This might include everything from plant growth, care and disposal, equipment rental and the operation the staff to operate it, data analysis and data visualization. This is purposely a little bit open ended, because it's going to depend on what your needs are, and the projects are going to vary. But specifically, the funding is not going directly to the company. It is already here to be used at the Danforth center core facilities. So this is not to produce a product. The company will not receive funds to produce their product or to fund their company staff. It is specifically funds to use the core facilities. Now I've got three example projects for you. These are hypothetical projects that I'm describing based on work we have previously done with other companies, not through this opportunity, but ways that people have used this. I know there's a lot of text on this slide, but you are going to receive these slides afterwards, and if you'd like this recording, and that way you can read a little bit more and think about how you might translate this into your own company and product. So one example is a company has a product that, when they spray it on plant leaves, it makes them more tolerant to drought. This is specifically we have done this project. I'll give you an example, this specific example, with a company. Now they have done this in one plant species. So they tested it on one plant to validate that this hypothesis, they have this idea, the challenge, right? It's not a and b of the technology readiness level, but has made it to C. They've done one experiment to show that this works, and they already have all the permits necessary, because that's a requirement. So what this project might look like? What they're going to describe is that they want the Plant Growth Facility to grow some corn plants. They haven't tested this in corn for about a month, and apply drought stress in a growth chamber to these plants. The phenotyping core facility, that's my facility, would apply the product that they have provided and measure plant health so that we can better understand and answer the question, Does their product work on another species under drought stress? Do we see that the product actually increases plant health under this stress condition? And then the data science facility would actually analyze the data from this experiment, including the image data, the weight data, and do statistical analysis to determine is there actually a significant difference when the product is applied compared to a control, or, in other words, a placebo, when that's applied. So this might be one project. I would estimate, really roughly, that this would take about five months in our facilities. It would cost roughly $20,000 so this would be the upper end of the size project that would be described in this opportunity. Okay, example project number two.
+3
plants, and does automated weighing of those plants, automated watering, fertilizing, and most importantly, it captures images. So a lot of what our team does is take pictures of plants and then make measurements on those images. You can see here Hui is coming in. This is sitaria, which is a model grass species, and this team is evaluating basically what are the genetic controls of drought stress response in sitaria. So we're going to see it water here in just a second. Here it comes. So here's the automated watering system that allows a really extreme level of control, but also evaluation of how those plants are using water, how their weight is changing over time. Here it goes again. It's going to lift that one up. Give it just a second. I'll tell you the most common question I get, which is, why do the plants move at that speed? Why is, why are the conveyor belts so slow? The answer is, we can control the speed. This is the optimal speed. Otherwise the plants throw themselves off the conveyor belt and it's very unpleasant. So that is the bellwether phenotyping facility. So this is available as part 
+1
of this opportunity. All right, so our next facility that really ties into the previous two is our data science facility. They offer an enormous amount of services. All of them really are not actually touching any of the plants, but are analyzing data. So this includes cloud computing. We typically use Amazon Web Services. They do statistical analysis. They can analyze genomic and transcriptomic data, image analysis, and this is the part really where we partner closely with them, which is that the Plant Growth Facility grows the plants. We take a lot of pictures, and then the data science facility is actually analyzing all of those images in order to collect plant traits. They do microbiome analysis, and they also do software development, so some custom software development. So again, all of these are available and can be used in partnership with the other facilities to analyze data, visualize that data, and really make statistically sound conclusions about what is going on in your scientific experiment. The one I want to highlight specifically is the image analysis. So this is done using plant CV. So this is, again, one of our custom imaging setups here. This uses a Raspberry PI System, which I think this was from my colleague, Malia Guillen. And here we're growing again, sitaria, but we're actually tracking the growth of these plants over time. This is really excellent for understanding germination rates. So which seed is going to germinate first. We can track without having to go in and check on the seed. We can get down to the minute accuracy we prefer to do by the hour of which seed germinates better. And then we can track many traits, over 20 different traits, in collaboration with the data science facility. All right. Next +1
on the list, we have our advanced bioimaging lab. So while I take pictures of the whole plant, the advanced bio Imaging Lab is taking pictures of things at the microscopic level, so things you couldn't see with the naked eye. They have an enormous amount of different microscopes down in that facility. And most importantly, they have the expertise and people who really have focused their entire careers on plants, and how do you take images of plants? So we've got these advanced macro microscopy so that means it's much smaller than we can see, but it's not so close that it's on a subcellular level. Confocal microscopy, that's a pretty common technique, but you need the real expertise in plants to make it possible. We then have electron and super resolution microscopy. They can do all everything, including sample preparation as well as image analysis. So again, check out the website if you want to see some details on what specific equipment they have available and examples of publications that have used that equipment. Next, we have the plant transformation facility. And so this is our facility that makes transgenic plants, and this includes gene editing, gene modification, knock in, knock out, lots of different opportunities. So they do everything from full service for people who are here on site, they have self service equipment that means equipment rental that you can use, and they have the experts again to make this all possible. So check out what they have to offer and in which species they have to offer for plant transformation. Next, we have bioanalytical chemistry facility for those of us who have have used the Danforth center before. This was previously called the proteomics and mass spectrometry facility, or pmsf, and recently was renamed because they have significantly expanded their services and what's possible with them. So rather than add on some words to the already long name, we they renamed it to be more inclusive. So this facility includes proteomics, so that's understanding what proteins are present in a sample, for example, in a leaf. Metabolomics, this can be targeted or untargeted. So this is an understanding of what chemical compounds are present in a sample. And now the recent addition is elemental analysis. So this is going to be things like magnesium and calcium and different ions that are present in a sample, and can be really important for understanding plant nutrient responses. And then finally, GCMs. So these are it's another technology that you can use. It's specialized for specific compounds. And of course, the expertise the people to recommend which technology is actually going to be best for your scientific question. GCMs is particularly useful for understanding plant volatiles, so the gasses that plants give off, you can actually find if you're if you come to visit St Louis sometime between now and March of 2026 this facility partnered with the Missouri Botanical Garden in a exhibit at the botanical garden in the SAKs museum to measure and better understand plant volatiles from plants from Madagascar. So that's a fun fact. Okay, those are all of the facilities that are available as part of this opportunity. Let's talk some details and examples of what is included in these projects. So what you can describe in your application is to include the staff time, so the personnel necessary to do everything from designing, executing and analyzing data from your experiments, depending on the project, it's going to depend on what your needs are. This might include everything from plant growth, care and disposal, equipment rental and the operation the staff to operate it, data analysis and data visualization. This is purposely a little bit open ended, because it's going to depend on what your needs are, and the projects are going to vary. But specifically, the funding is not going directly to the company. It is already here to be used at the Danforth center core facilities. So this is not to produce a product. The company will not receive funds to produce their product or to fund their company staff. It is specifically funds to use the core facilities. Now I've got three example projects for you. These are hypothetical projects that I'm describing based on work we have previously done with other companies, not through this opportunity, but ways that people have used this. I know there's a lot of text on this slide, but you are going to receive these slides afterwards, and if you'd like this recording, and that way you can read a little bit more and think about how you might translate this into your own company and product. So one example is a company has a product that, when they spray it on plant leaves, it makes them more tolerant to drought. This is specifically we have done this project. I'll give you an example, this specific example, with a company. Now they have done this in one plant species. So they tested it on one plant to validate that this hypothesis, they have this idea, the challenge, right? It's not a and b of the technology readiness level, but has made it to C. They've done one experiment to show that this works, and they already have all the permits necessary, because that's a requirement. So what this project might look like? What they're going to describe is that they want the Plant Growth Facility to grow some corn plants. They haven't tested this in corn for about a month, and apply drought stress in a growth chamber to these plants. The phenotyping core facility, that's my facility, would apply the product that they have provided and measure plant health so that we can better understand and answer the question, Does their product work on another species under drought stress? Do we see that the product actually increases plant health under this stress condition? And then the data science facility would actually analyze the data from this experiment, including the image data, the weight data, and do statistical analysis to determine is there actually a significant difference when the product is applied compared to a control, or, in other words, a placebo, when that's applied. So this might be one project. I would estimate, really roughly, that this would take about five months in our facilities. It would cost roughly $20,000 so this would be the upper end of the size project that would be described in this opportunity. Okay, example project number two. Katie Murphy
This is again a hypothetical. We have another company that has a product that when they apply it to plants, let's say, for example, they pour it over the soil, it affects plant growth. They have, again, showed some preliminary data to support this, and they hypothesize that it's actually related to plant hormone production. So if you're not a plant scientist like me, plant hormones are fascinating, just like humans, plants have different hormones that affect their growth, but they don't know how it's working, although they have this hypothesis and and they don't know what the active ingredient is in their product, either. So in this example, actually, perhaps we would not be growing the plants here at the Danforth center, but the company would just send samples of the plants that they've already collected once they've applied the product, and then the bio analytical bio analytical chemistry facility, excuse me, would determine possible active ingredients and would determine plant hormone levels. So this technology would be called LC MSMS, although they might use GC ms as well again, details of which you can find on the website. Now, there's no guarantee when we get a product with an unknown active ingredient that we can figure out what that active ingredient is. It's a bit of a fishing expedition anytime we approach projects like this, but the biomedical chemistry facility is extremely talented, and they can at least make a first attempt to understand what chemicals are present in a sample. So you don't have to this is an example where you don't have to grow plants here at the Danforth center. This doesn't have to be a massive project that is takes six months and includes many, many plants. You can just send samples to some of these facilities for analysis as well. All right, we've got a third example. This is another one that's a little bit larger, where a company might have determined in one species that when they edit a gene, it impacts plant growth. So they want to determine if this gene has the same effect when they transform it into another species. So for example, here, they might partner with they might utilize a transformation facility to make a transgenic soybean plant if they've tested this in another species that contain this gene of interest. Plant Growth Facility may grow these plants, the phenotyping facility may then determine if there really is a difference in growth between the one that has had transformation and the control plant. And then the data science facility would actually analyze the resulting data and do data visualization to determine if that gene modification impacted plant growth significantly or not. So this would be a little bit larger project that utilizes more of the facilities. So you can utilize just one, you could utilize more than one. There's lots of opportunities here. And I would encourage you in your application to talk about the different options as well of what you might use and why. All right, so down into a little bit of the nitty gritty. Again, we're going to provide you with these slides, but we want to share with you what are the evaluation criteria. How will we actually be evaluating these applications? So the first is the feasibility. We need to be you need to be sure that the project is possible here at the Danforth center within the core facility. Services that I've outlined briefly here, but are all available in detail on the website. It needs to pass all safety requirements, and it needs to be possible within the time and funding scope that's provided here. So if this is a 10 year project, unfortunately it's just not going to work with this opportunity. There needs to be commercial viability, so a clear market opportunity, a problem that's being addressed, and it needs to be innovative and scalable, relevant to AG food or climate solutions, or maybe all of the above we already have discussed, the Technology Readiness, scale and where we expect these products to or these, excuse me, projects to fall. And then there also needs to be a fit within the St Louis ecosystem. Is this an opening, a gateway, a pathway to future and further collaboration in our region? And can we uniquely support this, this opportunity, because we have such unique facilities, so it's about the fit within the St Louis ecosystem. Now I'm going to give you some tips for what is not a good fit for this funding call. We do not do DNA, RNA, any sort of sequencing here at the Danforth center, there are other facilities. There are genomics facilities at other universities that offer these but that's not part of this opportunity, but we do not have that facility here now. If you already have data from those facilities, our data science core can analyze the data for you, but we cannot do any sequencing. The same goes for microbiome. If you are interested in the soil, the leaf, the root, microbiome, we do not provide sequencing, and sequencing is not available as part of this call, although, if you already have data, the data science facility can analyze it. No field trials for this specific opportunity. So this is greenhouse and growth chamber use only if plant growth is part of your project, and we cannot purchase new equipment all right as part of this so it needs to use our existing services. We cannot develop apps that's been a previous request as again, as part of this opportunity, or new AI algorithms. But we have an enormous level of expertise and ways of analyzing images and data that are that are ready and available. But if, say, you want to develop something new, that's that's not a part of this opportunity. And then again, we need to make sure we fall within that technology readiness level, all right, safety and permit requirements. Now this will, that'll sort of be worked out when in the later stages of the application process, but it's important to know that all selected projects must pass safety review. So there are questions in the application about the safety of your product and the permits that you may need, and projects that are selected will undergo a safety review to make sure that they're possible it is possible to to evaluate plant pathogens. So these might these are things like bacteria, fungus and viruses, but they are limited in scope, and that is for the safety of of our staff and as well as the other experiments and just regulations that we have to uphold. So if you work with these sorts of things, you're going to know this language the greenhouse is BSL one only. This means biosafety level one. Growth chambers are BSL one and BSL two. So essentially, if you work with one of these things, this language is going to be familiar if you, if you don't work with any of these things, and you're not planning to, you don't need to worry about it. But there is a specific list of 
what pathogens qualify as BSL one or BSL two. We do not do any BSL three. In our facilities, we do not permit plants or microbes that have been transformed with mammalian genes. And the company, again, is responsible for the necessary permits. And this would be a discussion that happens when the project is selected, if there are permits that are needed determined to be needed. Another common question is intellectual property. So the selected projects will undergo a signing of an intellectual property agreement to make sure that the company maintains their intellectual property. The Danforth center maintains their intellectual property. This is all gets really clearly outlined, and this happens for any company that comes to work here at the Danforth with people here at the Danforth center, and is very standard, so your intellectual property is protected as well as that of the folks who work here. Okay, timeline, the applications are opening today. So right after this, I think the last slide, you're going to be able to scan for a link, and then Steph and Isabel are going to be posting more information for more links to the application. You have one month to apply. I promise the application is not too long, so I know that you can do it within a month. We have an expert panel who will be evaluating those we're going to be scoping the safety, feasibility and cost. So we understand that you may not know the exact cost of the experiment you're describing. You can use the examples as guidance of the ballpark of the timeline for what experiments take, what projects take, and the general cost, but those will be scoped by the facilities themselves, who determine if the work is possible and what it will take to do that project. Companies will be notified this September, and we're going to start those projects almost immediately in October, we're excited to get these underway and to support all of you, which is why we want this to be a quick process, because we know that you need results soon, and we want to make that possible, okay, common questions, and then we're going to go over some final tips before we open this up to questions from all of you. The first is, can I access these services without this award opportunity? Absolutely, we are open to external users. And for startups that have an address in St Louis as well, there is a 15% discount on core facility services for St Louis based startups. Can you provide matching funds? So say you want to design a larger project, or you have a project that's larger that you want to make possible through this opportunity, it's possible, it's possible that that could work. It's going to depend on the specifics of the project and what those matching funds are and where they're coming from. So please include that in your application if you want to make that possible. Can the funds support your team's time or supplies? Unfortunately, no. Again, this is only for those core facility services.
+1
what pathogens qualify as BSL one or BSL two. We do not do any BSL three. In our facilities, we do not permit plants or microbes that have been transformed with mammalian genes. And the company, again, is responsible for the necessary permits. And this would be a discussion that happens when the project is selected, if there are permits that are needed determined to be needed. Another common question is intellectual property. So the selected projects will undergo a signing of an intellectual property agreement to make sure that the company maintains their intellectual property. The Danforth center maintains their intellectual property. This is all gets really clearly outlined, and this happens for any company that comes to work here at the Danforth with people here at the Danforth center, and is very standard, so your intellectual property is protected as well as that of the folks who work here. Okay, timeline, the applications are opening today. So right after this, I think the last slide, you're going to be able to scan for a link, and then Steph and Isabel are going to be posting more information for more links to the application. You have one month to apply. I promise the application is not too long, so I know that you can do it within a month. We have an expert panel who will be evaluating those we're going to be scoping the safety, feasibility and cost. So we understand that you may not know the exact cost of the experiment you're describing. You can use the examples as guidance of the ballpark of the timeline for what experiments take, what projects take, and the general cost, but those will be scoped by the facilities themselves, who determine if the work is possible and what it will take to do that project. Companies will be notified this September, and we're going to start those projects almost immediately in October, we're excited to get these underway and to support all of you, which is why we want this to be a quick process, because we know that you need results soon, and we want to make that possible, okay, common questions, and then we're going to go over some final tips before we open this up to questions from all of you. The first is, can I access these services without this award opportunity? Absolutely, we are open to external users. And for startups that have an address in St Louis as well, there is a 15% discount on core facility services for St Louis based startups. Can you provide matching funds? So say you want to design a larger project, or you have a project that's larger that you want to make possible through this opportunity, it's possible, it's possible that that could work. It's going to depend on the specifics of the project and what those matching funds are and where they're coming from. So please include that in your application if you want to make that possible. Can the funds support your team's time or supplies? Unfortunately, no. Again, this is only for those core facility services. Katie Murphy
Finally, I thought of tips I wanted to give you as you're preparing your application. Is first, please check out the web page. We've got details on all these facilities. We have any equipment search database that you can use to really search what's available. And my suggestion to you is only propose things that are available, because if it's not available, unfortunately, then your project is not feasible. Within the scope of this opportunity, please include any information on on safety concerns, permits and availability, if it's applicable to your project, so we can evaluate if it's feasible and make sure that those projects can be accomplished in roughly three to six months. We We want these to be sort of packageable in that amount of time, and be very clear on the scientific question that you need answered. Right when we talked about the evaluation criteria, it's clear that there needs to be this commercial potential that needs to be solving a problem. So be very clear about what do you need? What is the scientific question that we can uniquely answer to help advance your company and what you have to offer? All right, that is my last slide. So this is the link to apply, which will be available elsewhere as well, if you don't have a moment to scan it right now and then, I think we can open it up to questions. Steph and Isabel, feel free to chime in if I'm missing anything important.
Stephanie Regagnon
That was excellent. Katie, I would just say, let's leave this slide up for another few seconds and then maybe take it down so we can all see each other, but that was excellent, and we very much look forward to your questions.
Katie Murphy
All right, sorry, I see one in the chat, so I'll answer this question, and then I'm going to close this so I can see all your wonderful phrases. Hello, Franco, yes, we do offer proteomics and metabolomics that's available from our bio analytical chemistry facility. Let me grab that slide for you real quick. So yes, we they have proteomics, metabolomics available as well as ionomics, which is that elemental analysis. Camera stop sharing when I can see more of this lovely screen, and then I can see the chat as well.
Katie Murphy
Feel free to ask out loud or put it in the chat. Yeah, Jesus,
Jesús De la Vega Anchondo
yes. Thank you, Katie, it's amazing. The the access font is very, very cool. I would like just to ask if you have, like, a media kit or something that we can use to share it with other investigators in our network.
Katie Murphy
Great question. Steph, can take that one,
Stephanie Regagnon
yes. So hey, Zeus, right after this call, I'm going to post something on LinkedIn from the yield lab Institute account. I We will also follow up with the link to this video recording of this call. If Katie is comfortable sharing her slides, we will also share the slides. And then there is a landing page on the Cultivar St Louis website that's all about this grant. So we'll be sharing all of those resources with you all after this call.
Jesús De la Vega Anchondo
Great. Thank you,
Katie Murphy
and thank you for sharing. We appreciate it. We want as many people to apply as possible, and like you saw, we're going to be able to support multiple projects with this. Yeah. Jorge's question is, what is the amount of the grant? Is there a limit and only one project per company? To be honest, Jorge, we hadn't thought about multiple projects per company. I would say probably just one project per company. We want to support as many people as we can. And then the limit to the grant is so the grants will be between, I believe it's two to 3000 up to $20,000 with of core services. So that funding is already here and is being used for the core services. And so it's going to depend on the scope of the project, and we hope to be able to support somewhere between two to five different projects, but it's going to depend on what people propose and what the size of those projects are. So I think to be successful, I'd suggest putting forth your one best and highest priority project in the application.
Stephanie Regagnon
Other questions, Katie, your presentation was so thorough. I'm not gonna lie, I worked at the Danforth center for five years, and I learned a lot in that pretty good.
Katie Murphy
Oh, excellent. Thank you. Yeah, there's so much information so
Stephanie Regagnon
Oh, Jorge, good question.
Katie Murphy
So the question is, it's a credit or the money goes through the company accounts for tax situations. That is a great question. I don't know that. I know the detailed answer on this, to be honest, but the funding is already here at the Danforth center, so it does not go through the company account. So I don't know what the tax implications are for that, but the dollars are, are here and stay here and work basically as a credit here at the at the core facilities.
Stephanie Regagnon
Okay? Well, if there are no other questions, give us just a few minutes and we will be following up by email. I encourage you all, especially those of you on the call that are representing ecosystems or investors, please do share this. This is an initial pot of funding that we very graciously received from Breakthrough Energy. It is absolutely our intention that if this is successful and if it's valuable to startups, we want to grow this pot of money. We want to make this grant Evergreen. And so this is our first attempt at this. And so we definitely want this first round to be successful, so that we have something to go fundraise for later. So please help us do that. Please also be in touch with us if you have questions. I think there's a lot of information here to go through, but the team at the Danforth center is always very willing to answer questions, and obviously, Isabel and I will help as much as we can as well. So any final comments or questions from the group? Jorge, yep, we will definitely send, we'll, we'll send that kind of stuff immediately following. Well, give me about an hour, actually, to get it all together. But yes, we'll get it out. It is wonderful to see all of you. I believe I'm going to be seeing some of you in Brazil next week at World agritech South America, which makes me very, very happy. So take care everyone. Have a wonderful rest of your week. And Katie, thank you so much. Isabel, thank you so much, and we'll see all of you very soon. Thank you. Thank you. Thank
Jesús De la Vega Anchondo
you very much. Bye.