Most brands ship probiotic strains they license from someone else's catalog. The strain isn't theirs to name, defend, or build a moat around. It could be.
Most probiotic products ship without the data and the assets that make the strain defensible. Here is what is usually missing, and what arrives in your hands when the work is done.
You have a COA with a genus and a CFU count. That is not enough to defend a label, replace a supplier, or hold a claim.
Illumina and Nanopore in house, closed genome assemblies, plasmid resolution, uniqueness comparison.
Supplier data was generated in MRS broth, not in your yogurt, capsule, ferment, cream, or feed pellet.
Host-cell adhesion on gut, keratinocyte, or fibroblast lines. Pathogen competition panels. Untargeted and targeted metabolomics on Orbitrap LC-MS/MS.
Live counts on a plate ten times what survives gastric transit, a feed pellet, or a cosmetic emulsion at month six.
Simulated GI, pellet survival models, cosmetic-matrix compatibility, pilot-scale lyophilization to greater than 1e9 CFU per gram at twelve months.
Antibiotic resistance and virulence genes get flagged years after launch. Transferable resistance is not a minor finding.
Screened against CARD, VFDB, ResFinder. Transferability assessed. Clean strains pass. Risky ones are rejected before they cost you a launch.
Your culture house can change blend, raise price, get acquired, or close. Your product changes with them.
Working bank against drift, master bank as the reference, strain deposited at DSMZ or ATCC under your name. You own the strain and the data.
From your sample to your strain, in six stages across three phases. A laboratory notebook, in tabs. Each stage builds the evidence you'll need at the next one, and the evidence regulators will need years from now.
We start with your material, fermented foods, raw milk, gut samples, kefir grains, soil from a heritage site, beverages, skin swabs. We dilute, plate on selective media, and pick colonies. Every promising morphotype is captured, photographed, and cryopreserved before anything else happens.
Live isolate collection in cryostorage, with metadata tied to your sample lot.
“Sample-to-colony is the first line of defense. If it doesn't grow, nothing else matters.”
Source intake & isolation
Week 1, 2
We start with your material, fermented foods, raw milk, gut samples, kefir grains, soil from a heritage site, beverages, skin swabs. We dilute, plate on selective media, and pick colonies. Every promising morphotype is captured, photographed, and cryopreserved before anything else happens.
Live isolate collection in cryostorage, with metadata tied to your sample lot.
“Sample-to-colony is the first line of defense. If it doesn't grow, nothing else matters.”
Identification, 16S, WGS, long-read
Week 2, 4
16S rRNA sequencing for genus-level call, then whole-genome sequencing (Illumina + Nanopore long-read) for species and strain resolution. We resolve plasmids and mobile genetic elements that short-read alone misses, critical for AMR and IP claims.
Closed genome assemblies with annotated coding sequences, plasmid maps, and a species/strain identity report.
“Long-read sequencing reveals the chromosome edges where short-read fails.”
Functional characterization
Week 3, 6
Growth kinetics in defined media. Bile and acid tolerance. Pathogen competition panel (Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria, C. perfringens, others by request). Adhesion to host cell models. Metabolite production, short-chain fatty acids, bacteriocins, exopolysaccharides, measured by HPLC and LC-MS.
Functional dossier per strain, phenotype scorecard plus raw assay data.
“A probiotic that doesn't survive bile is a feed additive, not a probiotic.”
Safety screening, AMR & virulence
Week 4, 6 (parallel)
We screen every genome against curated AMR and virulence factor databases (CARD, VFDB, ResFinder). Crucially, we check whether resistance determinants are chromosomal or on transferable elements, the regulatory difference between acceptable and disqualifying.
Safety dossier, clean strains pass; flagged strains are documented with the reason and rejected.
“A strain you can't defend in front of EFSA isn't a strain. It's a liability.”
In vivo and matrix testing
Week 6, 14
Simulated GI tract passage with dynamic pH and bile shifts. Stability in your actual product matrix, your yogurt, your oat milk, your feed pellet, your serum, across temperature, water activity, and shelf-life timepoints. Where applicable, in vivo piglet, broiler, or rodent studies through our partner network.
Matrix-stability curves, GI-survival rates, and in vivo efficacy data, efficacy proven where the strain will actually live.
“A strain that thrives in MRS broth is not a strain that thrives in oat milk at 4 °C for nine months.”
Production scale-up & IP support
Week 12+
Lyophilization protocol development to maintain >10⁹ CFU/g at twelve months. Cryoprotectant matrix optimization. Fermentation scale-up parameters. Background IP search through partner counsel, strain depository (DSMZ / ATCC) for priority date, and patent strategy support if your strain warrants it.
Production-ready process documentation. Deposited strain with accession number. Strain Dossier in hand.
“Owning the strain means depositing it, naming it, and being able to point to a number when asked.”
The microbiology, the cell biology, the sequencing, and the dossier work are the same across categories. The pain points and the proof buyers care about are not. Here is what each segment ships, and what we deliver into it.
Cultured dairy, plant-based ferments, kimchi, sourdough, kombucha-as-food.
Shipping unnamed microbes. The culture house could change blend tomorrow. Heritage claims need heritage evidence, not marketing copy.
Strain isolation from your finished food, closed-genome ID, matrix stability at production pH and temperature, EPS and flavor-compound profiling, polymicrobial community tracking.
Sourdough starter to a sequenced, deposited strain with a working bank and a Tier II Discovery dossier.
Whole Foods. Sprouts. Erewhon. Retailer category buyers who ask for strain-level provenance.
Wine, beer, kombucha, water kefir, functional drinks.
Your house culture is one cleaning cycle from gone. Commercial yeasts are the competitor's yeasts. Functional-drink claims need strain-level proof.
Isolation from cellar, barrel, lees, kveik, SCOBY. Yeast and bacterial ID, full WGS. Fermentation phenotype, organic acid and volatile profiling, cellar bank and recovery.
Kombucha SCOBY to a unique strain with acid tolerance, bacteriocin profile, and a cryopreserved backup.
Wineries protecting terroir. Craft breweries with a house signature. Functional-drink brands defending claims.
Supplement brands, formulators, DTC wellness.
A licensed strain is not your strain. Royalties forever. Catalog data does not match your capsule, tablet, or stick pack. Clinical positioning needs clinical-grade evidence.
Novel strain isolation, WGS, host-cell adhesion, simulated GI passage, untargeted and targeted metabolomics on Orbitrap LC-MS/MS, pilot-scale lyophilization, AMR and virulence to regulator grade.
Pick a strain out of your blend and elevate it to owned, with a dossier that holds up next to Chr. Hansen, Novonesis, Lallemand, Probi, or IFF reference data.
Formulators, regulatory counsel, retailers that gate by COA. Amazon, after 2024 supplement-policy tightening.
Microbiome skincare, postbiotic actives, ferment lysates.
Skin claims need skin evidence, not gut data. Live cultures do not survive most cosmetic matrices. Postbiotic and ferment-lysate claims are doing a lot of work without proof.
Isolation from skin and skin-adjacent niches. Function on keratinocyte and fibroblast lines, barrier markers, cytokine panels. Ferment lysate development. Preservative and emulsion compatibility.
Build a ferment-lysate active with dose response on keratinocytes and a path to MyMicrobiome certification.
Sephora Clean+Planet program. Ulta Conscious Beauty. Brands building toward MoCRA safety substantiation.
DFM developers, feed-additive companies, aquaculture, poultry health.
Most additives do not survive the pellet. Pathogen claims need pathogen panels. AMR rules are tightening at EFSA, FAMI-QS, and FDA.
Isolation from animal GI tract and farm environments. Pellet-survival models. Pathogen competition against Salmonella, E. coli, C. perfringens, Campylobacter. In vivo broiler and piglet through trusted partners.
DFM for broilers with feed-conversion data, pathogen-reduction data, and a dossier aligned to EFSA QPS and FAMI-QS.
Tyson, Cargill, JBS, Smithfield, Perdue, integrators that ESG-audit their feed supply.
A client sent us a kefir for full analysis. We isolated the community, sequenced what was there, and ran it against pathogen panels and metabolite screens.
We found a bacterial strain on the kefir with antimicrobial activity that was not on the label. The label came from supplier paperwork. No one had looked at the actual product at strain resolution.
We linked the genome to the function, validated the activity on pathogen panels, and confirmed the metabolite responsible with targeted MS. The client now owns the strain and the data that supports the claim.
Most labs would not have caught it, because most labs do not read microbiology, cell biology, and metabolic pathways in the same room. We do.
Projects are run by PhD-level scientists. The lab has an anaerobe chamber, Illumina and Nanopore sequencing, pilot-scale lyophilization and encapsulation, Orbitrap LC-MS/MS for targeted and untargeted metabolomics, a full cell-biology stack (incubators, plate readers, biosafety cabinets, sterile hoods, PCRs), and the molecular biology equipment a working microbiology and cell biology lab needs. The work is done in house.
The strain. The closed-genome assembly. The functional, safety, and matrix data. The dossier. The deposit accession. The IP groundwork. You own all of it.
GMP manufacturing. Human clinical trials. Regulatory submission filing. We build the dossier to the standard those partners need and stay at the table when the questions come back.
What you actually walk away with. Three tiers, scoped to what you need to defend, ship, or scale.
Who's actually in your product.
For brands that already have a working product but don't know what microbes are doing the work. We characterize the strains you already ship and give you a defensible identity report.
Established brands that need to back up label claims, prepare for regulatory inquiry, or replace a supplier without losing the formulation.
Strain isolation plus functional proof.
The full discovery package. We isolate strains from your starting material, identify and characterize them, prove function in matrices and assays that matter for your category, and clear them through safety screening.
Brands developing a new SKU around a defensible strain story, nutraceuticals, functional foods, beverages, skin microbiome. Where you need claims that hold up.
Everything you need to launch, defend, and own.
Discovery plus production engineering and IP groundwork. The deliverable is a manufacturable strain with a deposited reference, a path to scale, and the documentation a regulator, an investor, or a licensee will ask for.
Co-development engagements. Brands that want a strain nobody else has, with the production engineering and paper trail to take it from 2 L to 50,000 L and from prototype to shelf.
Not sure which tier fits? We scope based on where your product is, and where you need it to go.
Talk to us about your strainMost engagements are fee-for-service. You pay, we deliver, you own everything, clean and contained. Co-development is a different operating mode. We invest the team, you invest the brand, and we share what comes out the other side. Same lab, different commercial structure.
Co-development isn't better than fee-for-service. It's different. It tends to make sense when two or more of the following are true. If they are, the conversation is worth having.
A short structured form, the more specific the story, the better the first conversation goes.
Most engagements start one of two ways. Pick the one that matches where you are.
You have a product, a starter, a ferment, a swab, or a sample. You want to know what is actually in it and whether it can become an owned strain.
We send an isolation kit and a one-page NDA. You ship back. We isolate, run a short identity screen across the dominant organisms, and return a written report on what is there and what is worth advancing.
Initial identity report on the dominant organisms in your sample, with a recommended next step. Defined turnaround in the engagement scope.
Request a kitYou already have a strain. You want it characterized, screened to regulator standard, banked properly, and turned into a dossier you can hand to counsel or a retailer.
We start with WGS and AMR and virulence screening to make sure the strain is defensible. Then we layer functional, matrix, and safety work scoped to your category and your claim.
Closed-genome assembly, identity confirmation, and a clean AMR and virulence report. Then we scope the rest against your specific claim.
Send your strainFee for service, or co-development.
Defined scope, defined deliverable, defined cost. Milestone payments. You own everything that comes out of it: strain, data, dossier, deposit.
Reduced upfront in exchange for shared upside on the commercial strain. Used when the source material is differentiated and the brand has a real path to market.
Yes. Strains we isolate from your material are yours. The live culture, the closed-genome assembly, the assay records, the SOPs, the batch records, the dossier, all of it belongs to you. Where it makes sense we deposit the strain at DSMZ or ATCC under your name and hand you the accession. Ownership terms are written into the engagement agreement before the first plate is poured.
Sequencing is one step. You can buy that anywhere. What you cannot buy off the shelf is the integrated stack: isolation, identification, host-cell and matrix function, untargeted and targeted metabolomics, safety screening, banking, and the dossier, delivered as one coherent package by a team that runs the bench themselves.
We prepare the technical dossier to the standard each route expects: genome, AMR and virulence with transferability, taxonomy, safety data, matrix and stability data. Final regulatory submission is handled through partner counsel who specialize in microbial food, feed, supplement, or cosmetic regulation. We sit at the table when the questions come back.
That is usually the strongest case. We have worked with raw milk, kefir grains, kombucha SCOBYs, traditional fermented foods, gut samples, skin swabs, soil, cellar and barrel samples, and animal GI tract material. The harder the source, the more defensible the strain you walk away with.
Both. Fee-for-service is how most projects start: defined scope, defined deliverable, milestone payments. Co-development is for partners with a genuinely differentiated source material and a real path to market, where we share upfront cost in exchange for shared upside on the commercial strain. We walk you through both before you commit.
The platform
Claim ownership of the beneficial bacteria in your product. From discovery to dossier, we provide the bench and hand you the keys.