zamexnik

crop designer | co-founder & CEO of Nitroduck (YC F26 & 5050 C9) | iGEM 2025 Grand Prize Winner |

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

Nitroduck designs new colors, flavors, and disease resistance into fruits and veggies. We integrate CRISPR into breeding through pollen, making any crop gene-editable.

Breeding a new specialty crop variety takes 8 - 16 years: breeders hope for random gene combinations and mutations, then spend years picking out the good ones. Meanwhile, consumer tastes, the climate trends, and pathogens change way faster.

Now, accessible genome sequencing and AI can tell breeders what to aim for instead of what to hope for, and CRISPR can turn random mutations into chosen ones. The catch is that CRISPR only works on about 15% of crops. It has to go into a single stem cell that’s then regrown into a whole plant, a process that has to be worked out for each variety, which is cost-prohibitive.

We skip the stem cell and put CRISPR into a pollen grain. The grain pollinates a flower, and out comes an edited seed - seamlessly tapping into how breeders already work.

Matúš, Miro, and I are plant synthetic biologists who made duckweed, the smallest and fastest-growing plant on Earth, genetically engineerable. For doing so we won the Grand Prize at iGEM, the “Olympics of biotech.” During our studies, we engineered 4x more plants than the average plant scientist does in a whole career. Now we’re building Nitroduck, The Crop Design Company, which will make pesticides obsolete by 2042.

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@ATinyGreenCell Same here :D

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@SynBio1 Will take a look into it in Nireoduck :)

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

X intro: I'm Matt, a Czech-Slovak guy in red glasses, programming plant DNA to build the first Crop Design Company, to make GMOs sexy again, eventually :)

Funny enough, my family were in Greenpeace, the biggest GMO haters. I wanted to be a conservationist and joined some NGOs, but also crypto-anarchy groups, where I realized the best way to protect nature is to own land privately and leave it be.

Biotech was my closest shot at money, since I won some national biology competitions. So I went into cancer research, where the money is, until I met a girl, a plant scientist. Didn't get the girl, but became the plant guy who led a student team winning iGEM, the Olympics of biotech, together with @matgries and @miro_slau, Nitroduck's co-founders :)

Before Nitroduck took over, I held Slovakia's birding Big Year record, was the country's most productive bike food courier, a landscape photographer, mountaineer, and crypto anarchist :))

Now I'm in the US, forever grateful for @ycombinator , 5050, Tesla FSD, and so much more this country gave me!

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@redgreenbl35768 Growers just buy seeds each year, so pollen from those plants are not getting to commerciall produce of anything. Or they buy a tree once, the offspring or that tree is a fruit, not a new tree for them to plant, as it is too different

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

Nitroduck designs new colors, flavors, and disease resistance into fruits and veggies. We integrate CRISPR into breeding through pollen, making any crop gene-editable.

Breeding a new specialty crop variety takes 8 - 16 years: breeders hope for random gene combinations and mutations, then spend years picking out the good ones. Meanwhile, consumer tastes, the climate trends, and pathogens change way faster.

Now, accessible genome sequencing and AI can tell breeders what to aim for instead of what to hope for, and CRISPR can turn random mutations into chosen ones. The catch is that CRISPR only works on about 15% of crops. It has to go into a single stem cell that’s then regrown into a whole plant, a process that has to be worked out for each variety, which is cost-prohibitive.

We skip the stem cell and put CRISPR into a pollen grain. The grain pollinates a flower, and out comes an edited seed - seamlessly tapping into how breeders already work.

Matúš, Miro, and I are plant synthetic biologists who made duckweed, the smallest and fastest-growing plant on Earth, genetically engineerable. For doing so we won the Grand Prize at iGEM, the “Olympics of biotech.” During our studies, we engineered 4x more plants than the average plant scientist does in a whole career. Now we’re building Nitroduck, The Crop Design Company, which will make pesticides obsolete by 2042.

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@quine54771 Wow, that's hard ask!

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@Ce_GalvanC Yes, we will use it to "real problems" but they are often technically hard, so it's better to establish tech on something easy to do and easy to sell, and then use those money to solve more technical problems.

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@Maxime21475178 Thanks man!

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@Kaseymarkel It's not RNP @Kaseymarkel , but yes, we're also going to tackle corn at some point!

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@Alxemija Man, the AI is helping us to deliver!

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@TelepathicPug Planned!

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@Tanjim38 Blueberry, melon, spinach:)

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@YKischapped You played it spectacularly!

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@RaduTiciu @ycombinator @iGEM Thanks @RaduTiciu

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@Alexey_Kadet Thanks man! You will need to help us with those recombinases also! :D

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@rene_inckemann Thanks man for all your support! Hopefully we can collaborate on something useful soon!

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@greybaker Thanks @greybaker!

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@ThatMrE Thanks a lot man! Especially for accepting me to summer BioPunk cohort, which gave us great start in Bay!

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@ATinyGreenCell It's hard, but we'll make it happen, soon :))

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

Imagine pathogens like viruses, bacterias and fungi are nteracting with a plant on molecular level - they have effectors which are recognizing plant's receptors. Those receptors are always evolving not to be recognized by pathogen effectors, but pathogen is evolving faster. You can just predict where pathogen will evolve, and upgrade plant receptor in way that is making plant resistant - and you can make it before pathogen break that upgrade so you eventually don't need pesticides. And for that you need fast and cheap gene editing, which works on all crops, not just corn. I slightly simplified it above, but that's the principle. And it doesn't work for insects.

[zamexnik @jamexnik_]

@edalpx We should start a club of "founders working on sperm", Lol