# Cultivarium — full brief

> Cultivarium is an applied research lab industrializing the study and engineering of our living world. It builds tools, growth media, and protocols that make non-model organisms — across the entire tree of life — accessible to study and engineer, and releases the data, methods, and software openly to the scientific community.

## What Cultivarium does
Most of life is uncultured and genetically intractable. Cultivarium develops growth profiles, DNA-delivery protocols, and molecular tools for organisms that have never been engineered in the lab, and shares everything openly. Its scope spans the full tree of life: bacteria, archaea, fungi, plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates.

## The tree of life (scale it works across)
- Bacteria — ~1 trillion estimated species
- Archaea — on the order of ~10 billion (estimated ~1% of prokaryotic diversity)
- Fungi — ~3.8 million
- Plants — ~400,000
- Invertebrates — ~7.7 million
- Vertebrates — ~70,000

## Tools
- DNA Delivery — electroporation methods for delivering DNA into non-model organisms. Preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.18.689155
- POSSUM Toolkit — plasmid libraries to identify functional plasmids. Addgene: https://www.addgene.org/browse/article/28233976/ · Preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.05.19.541510
- MACKEREL Toolkit — libraries to identify functional promoter-RBS elements. Addgene: https://www.addgene.org/pooled-library/cultivarium-mackerel/ · Preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.02.23.581749
- MicrobeMod — software for methylation calling from bacterial genomes. Code: https://github.com/cultivarium/microbemod · Preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.11.13.566931
- GenomeSPOT — predicts microbial growth conditions from amino-acid composition. Code: https://github.com/cultivarium/genomespot · Preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.03.22.586313
- Cultivarium Organism Portal — data, methods, and community knowledge for a target organism. https://portal.cultivarium.org

## Sites
- Homepage: https://www.cultivarium.org
- Tools: https://www.cultivarium.org/tools
- Blog: https://blog.cultivarium.org
- Radio (24/7 AI science radio): https://radio.cultivarium.org
- PRISM (AI-captured lab protocols): https://prism.cultivarium.org
- Fungal biology program: https://fungi.cultivarium.org
- Organism Portal: https://portal.cultivarium.org

## Locations
- Headquarters: Watertown, Massachusetts, USA
- UK laboratory: London (opening Fall 2026)

## Careers
Hiring scientists and engineers: https://www.cultivarium.org/careers · Contact: info@cultivarium.org

## Profiles
- GitHub: https://github.com/cultivarium
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cultivarium/
- X: https://x.com/cultivariumfrx