These in-their-own-words pieces are told to Patricia Lane and co-edited with input from the interviewee for the purpose of brevity. 

Roya Aghighi partners with microbes and other living organisms to design and manufacture colours. This 34-year-old from Vancouver co-founded  Lite-1 to harness the power of microorganisms to transform organic waste into sustainable, eco-friendly colourants at scale. It won the 2025 Web Summit Vancouver's PITCH competition for early stage start-ups.

Tell us about your project. 

Imagine clothes that change colour or paintings that evolve or buildings that change hues with the position of the sun! Biofabrication means going beyond usual norms to build the perfect marriage between science, nature and design. 

Lite-1 works with, rather than against, natural systems to make colourants. In a process similar to brewing beer, our emerging technologies, including synthetic biology and biofabrication microbes, turn waste into clean colourants while repurposing thousands of tonnes of waste into microbial food and away from........

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