At Kingdom, we design Superculture^® ingredients from natural microbes. But where do these natural microbes come from? How do we find the strains that impart clinically validated benefits to our pets? The answer to these questions, and the foundation of the company, lies in our extensive biobank. A biobank, sometimes known as a biorepository, is a collection of biological samples (in our case, natural microbes) used for research. Kingdom’s biobank comprises thousands of diverse strains of bacteria and fungi isolated from food and the environment.

Building a biobank doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a huge amount of time and effort, plus a lot of scientific creativity. Here’s how we do it.

Finding sources of natural microbes

First, we research where beneficial microbes are likely to be found, such as fermented foods, fruits and vegetables, and even in the dirt. This is where we can get creative; I once ordered hákarl (a type of fermented shark meat) from Iceland. We collect samples and store them in the freezer to keep the microbes viable. 

Growing and isolating microbes 

Next, we culture the samples on media that will encourage the growth of the beneficial species we’re looking for. Once they grow, we subculture each strain (also known as an isolate) individually, and store the living cells in the freezer.

Sequencing the isolates

We can’t know what species we’ve found until we sequence them. We perform 16S/ITS rRNA amplicon sequencing, followed by whole-genome sequencing, to identify the taxonomy of each isolate. Careful analysis of the strain’s whole genome sequence is an important part of verifying that every microbe we select is safe for use in our Superculture^® ingredients.

Adding diverse strains to the biobank

Finally, when we know what strains we have and decide which we want to keep, we assign them a unique strain ID and add them to our biobank, stored in a robotic freezer, along with all of the information about where they were found. We can access this information through our proprietary data infrastructure, which also allows us to analyze complex characteristics of custom selections of microbes. We might, for example, search all the strains of a given genus for the presence of a gene or pathway expected to confer functional health benefits. We can pull the desired strains out of the biobank at any time, grow them up, and screen them for their impact on targeted health needs.

The opposite situation: finding model microbes for ingredient validation

When we choose strains for our ingredients, we don’t just think about their theoretical benefits, we test them extensively for activity against potentially undesirable microbes. Superculture^® Pet Oral is a great example of this. In order to develop an ingredient that reduces the unwanted bacteria driving poor oral health in dogs, we had to find some of these unwanted bacteria. Luckily, our experience finding beneficial microbes for our biobank can be directly applied to finding less desirable microbes as well.

The best place to find harmful canine oral bacteria is, of course, in dogs’ mouths. So, naturally, we went to the dog park. As we were at the dog park explaining to pet parents why we wanted to swab their dogs’ mouths, many shared with us that their dogs suffered from bad breath and poor oral health, and that they’d tried many different products without success. This is exactly the reason we validate our oral health ingredients against real canine oral bacteria.

We brought the samples from the dog park back to the lab and I cultured them on petri dishes designed to enrich the growth of these unwanted bacteria. I isolated and sequenced the strains, then chose the ones most associated with bad breath, plaque formation, and dental disease in dogs. We used these strains as model organisms to validate the in vitro efficacy of Superculture^® Pet Oral. 

Kingdom was grown around the biobank. It’s one of the first things we started building when the company was founded seven years ago, and we’ve continued expanding it ever since. It’s the basis of every Superculture^® ingredient, and one of the main things that make Kingdom, and our Superculture^® ingredients, so unique.