Startup works on color-changing petunia

FORT COLLINS – The founders of synthetic biology startup Revolution Bioengineering LLC are on a summerlong field trip to Ireland that they hope will result in their idea of a color-changing petunia taking root.

The Fort Collins-based company this month joined the inaugural cohort of the SynBio AXLR8R in Cork. The program is geared toward companies that use synthetic biology to engineer new biological functions in organisms, and offers business training, mentorship, lab space and funding.

Revolution’s chief executive and co-founder, Keira Havens, said her company will receive $30,000 in cash and about $30,000 worth of other services in exchange for 10 percent equity in the company.

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Revolution’s goal is to create Petunia Circadia, a flower that might be red in the morning, turn blue in the evening and then back again when the sun comes up. They’ll do it by tweaking the genetic material in the plant that determines color and linking it to the plant’s circadian clock.

“We are focused on making something beautiful,” Havens said in a phone interview from Ireland this week.

Havens, who recently received her master’s degree in computational biology from Colorado State University, founded Revolution last year with Dr. Nikolai Braun, who had been doing post-doc training in CSU’s biology department. Until the accelerator began, the company had been housed in rented facilities at CSU.

Havens said the color-changing flower would be only the beginning for their company. If Revolution is successful, its technology could lead to producing things like a flower that changes color on demand or a plant that pulls increased levels of carbon dioxide out of the air.

“This is kind of a new field, and there’s lots of space to explore, so there’s the possibility to build more useful items,´ said Havens, who grew up in Hawaii, attended the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and spent four years as an Air Force officer before heading to CSU for graduate school.

The plants Revolution is creating are genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, which have sparked controversy as they relate to agriculture and food. Havens and Braun had been working in a lab at CSU focused on developing plants that could offer a visual cue if certain substances in the air or soil were present when they got the idea for the color-changing petunia.

She said they were expecting a fair amount of backlash initially because of the GMO aspect, but said they’ve so far received mostly positive response about creating plants that could perform new useful functions. And she stressed that Revolution has no intent of introducing its technology into the food, medicine or agriculture pipelines.

“We thought the (petunias) would be a nice way to show the power of this technology,” Havens said. “It’s going to be kind of an experiment to see how people embrace this idea with technology that some folks are uncertain about.”

Havens and Braun, who attained doctorates in biophysics from the University of California Davis in 2007, started the company with about $6,000 of their own money, and had been working on their technology on nights and weekends. Only a few months ago, they thought their business idea was all but dead as they struggled to land funding for their research and their time at CSU drew to a close. But Havens stumbled across the accelerator just a couple of days before the deadline, and soon the duo was packing for Ireland.

Havens said the hope is that Revolution will be able to make enough progress with its science this summer that it will be able to prove to investors or other grant programs that they have a viable technology worth commercializing. She said the timeline from proof of concept to commercialization would be about two years.

“If (the accelerator) hadn’t come through I don’t think we’d be doing this anymore,” Havens said.