After a winding journey that took him to sites of environmental degradation on three continents, Eli Hornstein decided to move beyond his career as a conservationist and make a bigger difference in sustainable development by getting involved in agriculture.
He returned from Mongolia on a Fulbright scholarship to earn his PhD in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at North Carolina State University, where he addressed one of the greatest challenges to sustainability: climate change.
Through his startup, Elysia Creative Biology, he hopes to commercialize crops that are genetically engineered to virtually eliminate methane emissions from the cows that eat them.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is responsible for nearly a quarter of climate change, and agriculture, including cattle and similar livestock, is the second largest source of methane.
Many phytochemicals are very effective at suppressing methane … but they are expensive. They are difficult to produce.
Elysia is using its proprietary technology to genetically modify feed crops to produce compounds that suppress methane emissions from ruminant animals such as cows, sheep and goats. Hornstein’s goal is to get farmers and companies that grow grains and grasses for livestock feed to start using the genetically modified seeds.
“A lot of plant-based chemicals are very effective at suppressing methane — some come from seaweed, others are found in garlic and orange peels — but they’re expensive and difficult to produce,” Hornstein says.
“But what we’re talking about is using existing feed crops to produce these compounds. We’re giving farmers the exact same product they’ve been using all along and they don’t have to make any major changes to the way they operate their farms.”
Passion for people and the environment
How did Hornstein move from conservation to climate change and cows? He says it started with working on people and the environment.
Hornstein, who grew up in Raleigh, spent part of his childhood in Eritrea, sub-Saharan Africa, where his parents taught at the University of Asmara.
“That was the real beginning of my personal exposure to the wider world and my desire to improve the environmental situation on a global scale, especially for those who have been disadvantaged in the past and who are currently the victims of some of the world’s biggest problems.”
Determined to become a conservationist, he simultaneously attended Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a Robertson Scholarship, earning degrees in linguistics and biology, before doing conservation work in Panama, Costa Rica, Kenya, and finally Mongolia as a Fulbright scholar.
As he traveled the remote mountain regions from Mongolia to Southeast Asia, he realized there might be a faster, perhaps better way to get to the world he wanted.
“My goal was to observe first-hand the effects of climate change in some of the parts of the world that are imagined to be the least developed and most pristine,” he recalls. “I expected that these areas would remain relatively stable for the time being.”
What he found surprised him.
“The journey began with unprecedented floods in Ulaanbaatar that paralyzed the capital of this normally desert country, and ended with seeing pandas faint in extreme heat in Chongqing (southwest China),” he added.
Change of Course
What Hornstein saw changed his course.
“That experience, so early in my career, is one that I’ve returned to in forming my conviction that we have to address the roots of climate change, not just explore some last resort refuge,” he says. “As a conservationist, I came to the realization that we’re not going to be successful in protecting the environment by going out there to set up parks and programs unless we address the roots, which is the need to use land and resources to feed people on the planet.”
“To have the scale of impact I wanted, I needed to balance these pressures in agriculture, particularly in agricultural biotechnology, which has shown the ability to bring about rapid change in complex, slow-moving systems.”
Hornstein chose agriculture because nearly half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, putting added pressure on natural areas that remain in need of increased food supplies to feed a growing global population.
And he chose biotechnology because he believes it has a positive impact on agriculture. “My observation is that biotechnology has a history of creating rapid change in agriculture,” he says. “GM crops are adopted very quickly when people want them.”
But before entering the field of biotechnology, Hornstein knew he needed training and certification, so he headed to North Carolina State University, not only his mother’s alma mater but also what he considered “the best place to learn how to be an agricultural genetic engineer.”
Methane is just a by-product. We can remove it without harming anyone’s livelihood or changing the food available.
During his doctoral studies in Professor Heike Sederoff’s Plant Metabolic Engineering Lab, Hornstein focused on plant microbiomes and ways to reduce the need for fertilizer. He gained skills in the tools and techniques used in biotechnology, which he continued to utilize as a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University.
During his postdoc, he had heard about agriculture’s role in methane emissions and decided to see if he could find a biotech solution.
“The interesting thing about methane is that livestock production doesn’t need it. It’s just a by-product. It doesn’t harm anybody’s livelihood and it can be removed without changing anyone’s food,” Hornstein says. “And if we can eliminate methane emissions in one fell swoop without changing farm productivity, we’ve reduced the carbon footprint of agriculture. That’s a huge win for the climate.”
Initial tests conducted by Elysia in 2023 showed promising results: The plants produced large amounts of the company’s first methane inhibitor, and laboratory animals that consumed them saw a 90% reduction in methane emissions after just a few days.
“This was enough for us to believe that we should take the next step to build a company that can advance this technology and take it to the world,” he says.
Entering North Carolina State University’s entrepreneurial ecosystem
Hornstein founded Elysia in Durham but returned to NC State University to participate in what is now known as NC Plant Sciences’ Seed2Grow program.
His company is based in the Plant Sciences Building on NC State University’s Centennial Campus, and he says he benefits from being close to the university’s talented students and researchers, as well as programs designed to help budding entrepreneurs like him succeed.
“What was missing in our previous space was the ability to do advanced work with plants. As a young company, what we saw was that very few places offered the equipment for the type of work we needed to do,” he says.
“We needed not only PCR machines and incubators, but also greenhouses that knew how to work with plant samples and a sequencing and analysis center, all of which are located here in the Plant Sciences Building.”
You want relationships, not just equipment.
Hornstein said being at NC State “gives me the opportunity to continue to meet with professors and see new research coming out. When you first start working in the private sector, you don’t realize how many barriers there are between new science and private research. Being here breaks down those barriers.”
Hornstein also finds other programs at NC State beneficial, including the National Science Foundation’s Regional I-Corps training program, offered through NC State’s Office of Research Commercialization, which helps researchers bring their ideas and inventions to market through consumer discovery and market research.
Another useful program, he said, was North Carolina State University’s Miller Fellowship, which offered scholarships and start-up support to graduates who wanted to work full-time on launching startups but otherwise didn’t have the means.
“If you have a company and technology like me, but you need the resources and the community to grow and sustain it, use NC State’s existing entrepreneurship programs to build bridges and let the relationships grow organically,” he says. “You don’t just need the equipment, you need the relationships.”
Next steps
So far, Hornstein is positive about Elicia’s progress: Lab work has been promising, and in early July he and Elicia were awarded a prestigious Activate Fellowship, which provides significant funding, technical resources, and other support to early-stage scientific entrepreneurs.
Hornstein said it will be a few years before the company has any customers, and it needs to clear key technology and regulatory milestones. Next steps include securing additional funding for on-farm trials, which would involve deploying Elysia’s technology in common corn varieties and measuring emissions from cows in real-world conditions.
“Early testing has shown some positive effects that suggest if we can overcome these hurdles, we can expect great success on the other side.”
Notes: Seed2Grow, the North Carolina Plant Science Initiative’s startup program, is now accepting applications. For more information, please contact Kathleen Denya, Director of NC PSI Innovation Partnerships.
