REPROGRAMMING A MICROBE—TO CREATE ALMOST ANYTHING
Computers are great at handling information, but if it’s matter you need to manipulate, you can’t beat nature. The problem is getting nature to play along—and that’s where Ginkgo Bioworks comes in. A microbe is just “a self-replicating assembler that runs on digital code,” says Jason Kelly, the Boston-based startup’s CEO. If you rewrite the code, by splicing new segments of DNA into
its genome, you can induce a yeast cell to produce rose oil, which Ginkgo does for perfume manufacturers. “Our job is to get the microbe to do what the customer wants,” Kelly says.
“It’s looking at biology from the viewpoint of a programmer.”
Kelly founded Ginkgo in 2008 with three classmates from his PhD program at MIT— Reshma Shetty, Barry Canton, and Austin Che—and their professor, Tom Knight, one of the pioneers of the field now known as synthetic biology. When they first worked together seven years earlier, the science was roughly where computers were in the 1950s. But as the sequencing and printing of DNA have gotten radically cheaper, “synbio” is making its way into industries from fashion to food to cannabis. Investors and customers are taking note. To date, Ginkgo has raised more than $400 million. “Customers are coming up to us, saying, ‘Program me a GMO to do something,’ ” says Kelly. Ginkgo is doing just that with Bayer, in a $100 million joint venture that will develop microbes that eliminate the need to use nitrogen fertilizer on corn crops.
ON ICE A Ginkgo Bioworks staffer reaches for some of the company’s biological material, which is so delicate it must be stored at subzero temperatures.