Myconaut integrates macro and microbiology to transform PFAS contamination into manageable environmental solutions
PFAS are no longer an emerging issue. They are a distributed, system-level constraint across water infrastructure, agricultural land, industrial supply chains, and human health. Their defining characteristic, the strength of the carbon-fluorine bond, has made them resistant to environmental degradation and many conventional treatment tools.
In short, we’re building living systems that can eventually break the unbreakable bond. For those working in this space, the challenge is not defining PFAS, but what remains unresolved. How do we move from capture and containment toward scalable, economically viable transformation pathways?
Existing technologies such as activated carbon, ion exchange, membrane separation, and thermal processes are essential. They concentrate and control PFAS for compliance and risk reduction. However, extraction is not a terminal solution. Concentrated PFAS streams still require destruction, and current pathways can be costly, energy-intensive, and complex.
This is where biotechnology is beginning to reshape the conversation.
We are entering a phase of rapid growth in environmental biotechnology. In this model, ex situ bioreactors and in situ ecological systems integrate with existing infrastructure, allowing concentrated PFAS streams to be routed into biologically active systems operating under lower energy conditions and fermentation-driven processes.
Unlocking this potential requires more than application. It requires understanding.
From a regulatory perspective, biological systems must demonstrate not only performance, but predictability. This includes defined operating conditions, monitoring pathways, and clear endpoints to ensure PFAS are reduced rather than redistributed. Without this control, even promising systems remain difficult to scale.
At the centre of this effort is multi-scale biogeochemistry. This includes linking microbial activity with protein expression and genomic potential with observed metabolic behaviour. It also requires confronting horizontal gene transfer, where functional traits move across microbial populations in unpredictable but adaptive ways.
In practice, this means understanding how functions are expressed under real conditions, and whether they remain stable over time. For regulatory acceptance, it is critical to distinguish adaptive systems from uncontrolled ones. Myconaut emphasises selection within environmentally compatible, non-pathogenic microbial communities, maintaining ecological balance while enabling functional outcomes.
These challenges sit at the intersection of environmental engineering, microbiology, and data science. They are increasingly measurable through tools such as MALDI-TOF, whole genome sequencing, LC-MS/MS, and high-throughput phenotypic screening. The question is no longer whether these systems can be observed, but whether they can be understood well enough to be directed and repeated safely.
It is within this convergence that Myconaut was formed.
Origins: Ecology as a design framework
Myconaut did not begin as a PFAS company, but with an effort to understand fungi as ecological orchestrators within soil systems.
The founding premise was that soil is not inert, but a living system that can be degraded and, under the right conditions, restored. This perspective draws from regenerative agriculture, where soil is understood as a network of microbial communities, fungal mycelium, plant roots, and chemical gradients that govern transformation.
Fungi provided an entry point due to their extracellular enzymatic systems. Enzyme classes such as laccases have shown the ability to oxidise complex organic compounds, suggesting biology could act on molecules once considered resistant.
PFAS, however, presented a deeper constraint. The strength of the carbon–fluorine bond limited fungal-only approaches. Early experiments showed fungi could tolerate PFAS and influence environmental conditions, but were not sufficient to drive meaningful degradation alone.
This realisation clarified the problem. The path forward would not be found in a single organism, but in systems.
From single organisms to systems: The BioRecurrent Selection Process™
Myconaut’s response to this challenge is the BioRecurrent Selection Process™, an approach that shifts focus from isolated organisms to evolving ecosystems.
Within these systems, fungi provide structural networks that stabilise environments and facilitate redox activity. Bacteria contribute metabolic specificity, including potential defluorination pathways, while plants can act as biological interfaces that draw contaminants into the rhizosphere and concentrate microbial activity.
What distinguishes this approach is not just the combination of organisms, but how they are refined. Systems are iteratively tested, observed, and reselected under real-world conditions. Field performance informs laboratory analysis, and lab insights guide subsequent deployments, creating a feedback loop that improves system precision over time.
The result is a dynamic platform that adapts to different contaminants, soils, and environments, effectively a form of directed ecological evolution. This iterative process also creates a significant opportunity to develop and patent novel workflows for PFAS detection, microbial analysis, and system optimisation.
From a deployment perspective, systems remain bounded within defined environments, whether ex situ or monitored in situ. The focus is on enhancing existing ecological functions under controlled conditions, with monitoring protocols that track system behaviour over time.
Scientific validation: NSF SBIR Phase I and the University of Minnesota
Myconaut’s transition into structured scientific validation was supported through an NSF SBIR Phase I award, in partnership with the University of Minnesota and the Zhang Lab, alongside additional academic collaborators. Building on this foundation, Myconaut has submitted an NSF SBIR Phase II application to scale and further validate these findings.
This work advanced understanding of how biological systems interact with PFAS, showing that bioaugmentation can increase PFAS uptake and translocation within plant systems when microbial and fungal communities are aligned. It also revealed measurable microbial shifts under PFAS exposure, indicating adaptive responses that may be leveraged over time.
Sequencing technologies identified candidate genes associated with PFAS interaction, while LC-MS/MS and fNMR enabled tracking of PFAS movement through soil and plant systems. Together, these tools began linking biological potential with observable outcomes.
The results highlight that PFAS behaviour is not uniform, varying by compound, environment, and community composition. For regulators, this reinforces the need for site-specific validation and standardised measurement frameworks. Myconaut integrates EPA-aligned analytical methods and reproducible sampling protocols to ensure results are comparable across environments and over time.
Field pilot: Grostic Farm
At Grostic Farm in Michigan, these concepts were tested under real environmental conditions.
Field trials integrating microbial inoculants, fungal amendments, and plant systems produced measurable reductions in PFOS and PFOA over the study period. At the same time, shorter-chain PFAS compounds exhibited increased mobility and phytoaccumulation, highlighting the dynamic nature of these systems, consistent with partners’ data looking at plants and PFAS fate.
These outcomes underscore an important point. Biological remediation is not a simple process of removal. It involves transformation, redistribution, and interaction across environmental layers. Understanding these dynamics is essential for designing systems that move beyond containment toward meaningful change.
This includes explicitly accounting for potential increases in mobility of certain PFAS fractions and short-chain compounds. In Myconaut’s approach, these dynamics are treated as measurable system behaviours, with monitoring strategies designed to ensure that overall PFAS mass and risk are reduced rather than shifted between compartments.
Building on these field insights, Myconaut, in collaboration with NMU, Hemp4Humanity, Florida Polytechnic, and EGLE is now advancing bench trials using Grostic Farm soil to evaluate Total Organic Fluorine and the production of PFAS non-detect biocarbon via pyrolysis at 1100 °C, with results anticipated in fall 2026.
Lessons from bench scale to full scale: Translating signals into systems
Myconaut’s bench-scale PFAS trials operate within a highly complex environment. PFAS includes thousands of compounds, each responding differently to biological, chemical, and physical conditions. Even under controlled settings, small changes in media, microbial communities, or analytical methods, can significantly influence outcomes, making repeatability a persistent challenge.
These bench results, while directional, require rigorous field validation to become actionable. Transitioning to pilot and full-scale environments introduces variability in soils, hydrology, and co-contaminants that cannot be fully replicated in the lab. As a result, validation depends on layered analytical frameworks that address both current and future liabilities, including EPA Method 1633 for targeted compounds, Total Organic Fluorine or TOP assays for broader mass balance, and fluoride measurements to assess potential defluorination.
Together, this creates a capital-intensive, R&D-heavy pathway where success is defined not only by performance, but by the ability to generate defensible data across regulatory frameworks.
Instrumentation and the limits of insight
The ability to measure biological systems has advanced rapidly, but interpretation remains a central challenge. Tools such as MALDI-TOF by Shimadzu enable rapid microbial identification at the protein level, while whole genome sequencing reveals genetic potential under varying conditions. Phenotypic microarrays offer insight into metabolic behaviour across environmental inputs, and LC-MS/MS and TOF analyses track chemical transformations with increasing precision. Emerging detection platforms such as Wave Lumina and DESI-MS from Purdue expand this landscape by enabling spatially resolved, surface-level chemical analysis, opening new pathways for observing interactions in situ.
For regulatory stakeholders, these tools function as both scientific instruments and validation mechanisms. Aligning biological outcomes with established analytical frameworks, including EPA-standard methods, remains essential for translating experimental systems into permitted technologies.
At the same time, these tools highlight key limitations. Genes may be present but not expressed, traits may transfer between organisms, and environmental conditions can activate or suppress pathways unpredictably. Progress depends on integrating these layers into coherent models that connect biology, chemistry, and environmental context.
Regulatory readiness and risk framework
Translating biological PFAS remediation into deployable solutions requires close collaboration with engineering firms to validate performance under real field conditions and align with regulatory frameworks. Myconaut’s approach is being developed with this integration in mind, ensuring that biological systems can be deployed in ways that are both measurable and compliant, while remaining practical for agricultural environments.
Operationally, systems are designed to function within defined treatment boundaries, whether through contained ex situ bioreactors or monitored in situ applications with clear site controls. Monitoring relies on layered analytical validation, including Total Organic Fluorine, targeted PFAS analysis via LC-MS/MS, and inorganic fluoride measurement to assess defluorination, allowing performance and mechanism to be evaluated together.
Equally important is translating these regulatory expectations to farm fields in a way that protects public health without disrupting the food economy. This requires defining system endpoints, understanding when biological activity stabilises or declines, and accounting for failure modes such as PFAS mobilisation or intermediate formation. By addressing these factors upfront, biological remediation can move toward credible, field-ready implementation.
Ecosystem support and regional innovation
Myconaut’s development has been critically supported by InnovateNMU SmartZone and the State of Michigan start-up eco-system, along with federal programmes such as NSF SBIR.
These initiatives play an important role in enabling early-stage innovation, particularly in regions, rural or urban, directly impacted by PFAS contamination. They provide the resources and infrastructure needed to move from concept to deployment, and they reflect a broader recognition that environmental challenges can drive regional innovation ecosystems.
Support from public leadership, including figures such as Senator Gary Peters and Congressman Jack Bergman, has reinforced the importance of investing in technologies that address both environmental and economic resilience.
Partnership network: Converging disciplines
The complexity of PFAS contamination requires collaboration across disciplines.
Myconaut works with academic institutions such as Northern Michigan University and Oakland University, CaptureTech, high-quality analytical partners, including Ann Arbor Technical Services, and environmental engineering firms that translate research into deployable systems. This network reflects the understanding that no single domain holds the full solution.
There is also a broader context that cannot be ignored. PFAS contamination is now widely distributed across ecosystems and human populations. It is present in water, soil, and biological systems, including our own. Addressing it requires not only technical innovation but a willingness to share knowledge, refine best practices, and accelerate learning across institutions.
This collaborative approach is not only a scientific necessity but a practical response to a growing reality. PFAS contamination represents a shared liability across industries, municipalities, and communities. Solutions must therefore be developed in a way that is both technically credible and economically viable, reducing long-term exposure and remediation costs simultaneously.
Conclusion: From validation to deployment
Myconaut is advancing a remediation model that integrates biology, engineering, and data into a single framework. The company is moving from validation to deployment, with technologies demonstrated in lab and field settings, early customer validation underway, and partnerships in place across analytics and engineering. Commercialisation and licensing pathways are actively being developed.
To support this phase, Myconaut is raising a pre-seed round to expand pilots, scale microbial production, enhance multi-omics capabilities, and integrate biological systems into existing remediation infrastructure. This work is grounded in regulatory alignment, customer validation, and practical deployment pathways.
The opportunity ahead will be defined by integrated systems, not single solutions. In this model, biological approaches complement existing technologies, enabling more complete and cost-effective PFAS management. The work remains complex, but a credible path forward is emerging beyond containment and toward transformation.
Please Note: This is a Commercial Profile
This article will feature in our upcoming April PFAS Special Focus Publication.
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