Is Glowing Plant changing it’s name to TAXA? What started as a record breaking kickstarter, raising $484k on the site from over 8k backers, Antony Evans recently announced a new product at SynBioBeta London, or is it a new company?

What is TAXA?

Antony Evans, CEO of TAXA explained that:

“The TAXA platform has been specifically designed to engineer novel metabolic pathways into plants for the development of new consumer applications without ever needing to step into a lab. We’re more than just a glowing plant product, we’re a platform technology for many different apps”.

The platform hopes to encourage an influx of consumer applications of biology while allowing for the engineering of novel metabolic pathways of up to ten genes long into plants.Following the agile development methodology, Antony hopes that the bioentrepreneurs will appreciate the speed-up in design, build and test which allow the platform’s users to release successive versions more rapidly. As a result, the overhead cost of the product will decrease and come to market faster. He also thinks the platform will be popular amongst European researchers because it will allow them to take a product to market in the USA uninhibited by regulations surrounding GMOs in Europe.The move to open up the platform to other users will add TAXA to the growing list of cloud providers, including Transcriptic, Emerald Cloud Lab, and other genetic engineering software as a service companies that includes Benchling, Genome Compiler, TeselaGen and Desktop Genetics. The end goal being that we can move biotech to the cloud and be designing novel genetics circuits and products whilst sipping a cocktail on the beach in Bali.https://twitter.com/gbstan/status/590894561972658176