Module 01 · Microbial resources
Cutis Microbe Bank — microbial resources for material discovery.
The Cutis Microbe Bank is where every CutisBio programme begins: our own isolates from healthy human skin and from soil, food and marine environments, banked with the ownership and commercial rights that let a strain become a product.
Why a bank of our own
A material is only as free as the strain it comes from.
Strains obtained from public collections or partners carry terms that follow the material into every product made from it. Isolating and banking our own strains, under approved protocols, keeps ownership and commercial rights clear from the first experiment.
A skin-derived bank has a second value: the microbes that live on healthy skin are the natural starting point for skin- and hair-related materials, and for understanding the skin microbiome itself.
What the bank holds
From skin and environmental microbiomes.
Skin-derived isolates are collected under an institutional review board-approved protocol and include aerobic bacteria, Cutibacterium and Malassezia. Environmental isolates come from soil, food, marine and other environments.
Every isolate is characterised and stored under controlled conditions, so that a programme can start from a strain with a known identity and history.
Skin-derived microbes
Sampling and isolation under approved protocols
- Aerobic bacteria
- Cutibacterium
- Malassezia
Environment-derived microbes
Resource discovery across ecological environments
- Soil
- Food
- Marine and other environments
Characterise · trace · preserve
A starting point for strain engineering and skin microbiome research
The categories describe the origins of microbial resources, not the size of the collection.
Production hosts
Production hosts chosen for the target.
Discovery can start in any isolate; production runs on hosts with an industrial track record, selected for growth, handling and fit with the intended process.
Escherichia coli
Fast-growing bacterial workhorse for pathways that need rapid design–build–test cycles.
Corynebacterium glutamicum
Industrial amino-acid producer, suited to large-scale fermentation of amino-acid-derived molecules.
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Food-grade yeast for eukaryotic pathways and robust, well-understood process behaviour.
Yarrowia lipolytica
Oleaginous yeast for lipid- and sterol-related molecules.
Ownership and use
Banked with the rights to use it.
- 01
Own isolates
Strains isolated by CutisBio under approved protocols, not licensed collections.
- 02
IRB-approved sampling
Skin-derived strains collected from healthy volunteers under an approved protocol.
- 03
Commercial rights
Ownership and the right to commercial use secured for materials developed from the bank.
- 04
Feeds the platform
Isolates and learnings flow into the KeySS families, the CutisBiofoundry and the skin microbiome analysis service.
Next module
From the bank to key starting strains
KeySS turns banked isolates into key starting strains that already make the starting material for a whole family of molecules.