The journey that began with Edison’s light bulb is now headed toward highly energy-efficient, eco-friendly and naturally brilliant and colorful ambient light sources. OLED, short for Organic Light Emitting Diode, is the next stage in this evolution. Large-scale adoption of ambient OLED lighting is still hampered by high production cost and several issues with blue light emitting layers. The molecules that emit light in living organisms are closely related to those used in OLED.

But they are better – more stable and energy-efficient. umi-hotaru’s materials discovery engine, we call it “Mimotype”, provides an integrated workflow for decoding molecules from light producing organisms using, step 1, DNA sequencing. Once we identified and validated potential candidates in step 2, we will take those DNA sequences and, step 3, use bioreactors to produce materials in the kg and even ton range in a process called bio-manufacturing.