Tierra Biosciences announced the launch of the Tierra Protein Platform, the first eCommerce portal that allows food manufacturers to have custom proteins synthesized, validated, and shipped in just few clicks. 

The platform provides a faster and more convenient solution for synthetic biologists, drug developers and researchers who need to source thousands of proteins for research and development of novel textiles, cosmetics, and flavours.

"Proteins have many different forms and functions, from converting carbon dioxide into starch ,to fighting infections in our body. After genomics, they are the next major biological frontier,” said Zachary Sun, Ph.D., co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Tierra. “However, the traditional lack of convenient research tools and ordering platforms can create significant time and cost bottlenecks for critical synthetic biology research.” 

“We specifically developed the Tierra Protein Platform to solve these challenges and give everyone a convenient way to access a diverse range of proteins — even those that are impossible to produce in common laboratory cells,” continued Dr. Sun. “We believe this will significantly lower the barrier-to-entry for protein synthesis.”

Customers can enter up to 10,000 digital protein sequences into the company’s easy-to-use online portal. Tierra’s proprietary artificial intelligence system then analyzes the input to assess whether the proteins are compatible with the manufacturing system. From there, the company uses a cell-free manufacturing process to synthesize the final proteins, which are then shipped after extensive quality control and experimental validation. Eliminating the need for living bacteria to synthesise proteins, substantially increases efficiency and throughput.

Tierra’s platform has already been operating at a commercial scale, serving customers across industries and geographies. Salesforce, one of the company’s earliest customers, approached Tierra to synthesize and test over 500 synthetic proteins. “It is exciting to consider what Tierra will enable in the field of computational biology,” said Ali Madani, Senior Research Scientist at Salesforce. “Our work had generated thousands of computationally designed proteins, but we had no simple way to empirically validate them. Tierra’s platform was the missing piece to our research stack, providing invaluable data and insights that have carried our research forward faster than would otherwise be possible.”

Tierra Biosciences is a synthetic biology company led by a team of protein experts transforming the way people discover, screen, and develop proteins for future bio-based products. 

For more information about the Tierra Protein Platform, please visit tierrabiosciences.com.