Upcycling the Fastest Plant on Earth: NitroDuck's Automated Duckweed Chassis

​Join iGEM 2025 Grand Prize winners NitroDuck as they unpack how synthetic biology and machine learning are turning the world's fastest-growing plant into a high-throughput manufacturing engine. See how their automated pipeline sidesteps centuries of selective breeding, speeding up genetic engineering fivefold to churn out scalable, AI-designed cyclic peptides built to outpace evolving crop pathogens.


Speaker Bio

​Fresh off winning the Grand Prize at the iGEM 2025 Grand Jamboree in Paris, NitroDuck is one of synthetic biology's most talked-about new ventures. Born out of the Brno, Czech Republic iGEM team, the company also placed 3rd at the European SynBio Hackathon before spinning out as a TechBio startup.

​Co-founders Matej Zámečník (CEO), Matúš Grieš (Head of TechBio), and Miroslav Rosputinský (Head of SynBio) are turning duckweed (Spirodela), the fastest-growing plant on Earth, into a next-generation bio-manufacturing chassis. Duckweed already rivals soybeans for protein density, but has missed out on millennia of selective breeding. NitroDuck closes that gap with a synthetic biology platform that accelerates duckweed's genetic engineering fivefold.

​What began as a solution to agricultural nitrogen pollution, upcycling manure runoff in vertical automated farms, has grown into something bigger: an automated pipeline paired with machine learning to design antifungal cyclic peptides. Because duckweed naturally has the cellular machinery to cyclize and stabilise these complex molecules, NitroDuck is turning it into a scalable, low-cost host for producing crop protection and fungicides that can evolve as fast as the pathogens they target.