What Diversa did was steal one microorganism's method of performing this at high temperatures.
Diversa has a patented technology that produces 100% human antibodies synthetically, in the laboratory.
One exotic breed Diversa has begun selling produces ethanol 30% more efficiently than conventional methods.
The biodefense research may benefit Diversa's efforts to develop anti-infective drugs and take them to market.
"No one else has Diversa's technology platform, " says Dennis Harp , an analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities.
Diversa and Maxygen have found ways to accelerate this process in the lab, and this has worked fairly well.
He hopes a separate DuPont partnership with Diversa will find an economical way to make biofuel from agricultural waste.
After completion of more pre-clinical studies, Short hopes to file Diversa's first investigational new drug application sometime next year.
This is attracting the attention of San Diego-based Diversa and Redwood City, Calif.
Diversa has a faster way: It looks at the cells' DNA and uses that to make the chemical in question.
Back in the lab Diversa rearranges the genes inside these enzymes to make them even better at what they do.
Diversa has attracted notice because of its unique method of producing human antibodies, which are disease-fighting proteins produced by the immune system.
Diversa is also chasing drug compounds, looking for its own new antibiotics.
And whether the microorganisms come from Yellowstone or elsewhere, Diversa is fast to find out if they carry any marketable chemicals on them.
Diversa is perhaps best known for having contracted with Yellowstone National Park to plumb the DNA of the microorganisms that live in geologic formations there.
Jay Short , chief executive of Diversa, hopes that the research funded by the grants will lead to development of drugs to treat both diseases.
Diversa can also produce the antibodies more quickly than previous methods.
Before Invitrogen announced it had licensed these chemicals, Diversa had only one product on the market, an enzyme that cleans the hot depths of oil wells.
In July, Diversa acquired a number of antifungal compounds from GlaxoSmithKline (nyse: GSK - news - people ) in exchange for equity in Diversa.
This technology opened the way for Diversa to produce antibodies.
Diversa dvsa (nasdaq: dvsa - news - people) is an expert at getting commercially useful chemicals from microorganisms that live in extreme environments like geysers and hot springs.
So far, working with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Diversa has used its patented protein-analysis technology to identify proteins in the organisms that cause plague and anthrax.
Diversa has used this technique to develop a valuable enzyme used for cleaning oil wells, and Maxygen has developed enzymes used in industrial production and for the manufacture of other drugs.
Diversa, a California biotech, has isolated an enzyme from a volcanic crater in Russia that is now being used to help whiten paper, reducing the need for chlorine dioxide, an environmental pollutant.
Scientists with San Diego biotech firm Diversa have descended into volcanoes in Siberia, plumbed thermal vents 3, 000 feet deep in the Atlantic Ocean and crawled around the humid rain forests of Costa Rica.
For instance, San Diego-based Diversa (nasdaq: DVSA - news - people) has formed a joint venture with Dow Chemical (nyse: DOW - news - people) to develop enzyme products.
"This field has been tainted with a lot of promises of finding new drugs, but the problem has been that we've had to establish a very good baseline with many large pieces of DNA, " says Eric Mathur, Diversa's senior director of molecular biology.
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