For Ginkgo, 2023 has been a banner year for serving companies leading innovation in agriculture. We’re grateful to be working with partners who are developing safe, efficacious, and consistent products for growers around the globe. Here’s our year in review.
Grateful to work with innovative partners
On the heels of expanding our ag biologicals R&D footprint and team, we entered a partnership with Syngenta, applying our encapsulation and screening technology (EncapS) to help them identify improved leads for novel plant traits. Learn more about our EncapS technology in this 5-minute video.
In addition to supporting novel traits, we also signed partnerships aimed at improving some of our partners’ existing products. These R&D programs aim to drive important commercial outcomes for our partners: strengthening their position in the biologicals market with higher-performing products or accessing greater market share by reducing unit costs of production. Read more about these collaborations:
- AgBiome leverages our Rapid Strain Optimization services to improve product performance
- Exacta Biosciences taps our fermentation optimization and formulation capabilities to drive down COGS of their biostimulant product, FitoRoot®
- OneOne Biosciences will work with Ginkgo for in vitro and in planta assays to test OneOne’s Livepods™ product delivery concept. In a second phase, Ginkgo’s Rapid Strain Optimization services will aim to provide optimized strains for nitrogen fixation.
We’re thrilled to be partnering with Agrivalle to help strengthen their position in Brazil’s fast-growing ag biologicals market. Agrivalle has tapped us to be their innovation partner; we’re excited to bring our full spectrum of R&D capabilities to deliver higher performing biologicals and develop novel products that complement their existing portfolio.
And we couldn’t be more excited about our continuing partnership with Bayer, of course.
New service offerings for biologicals and traits
This year, we launched a suite of services for ag biologicals and plant traits innovators.
Our Product Headstarts aim to de-risk the early discovery part of new product development. Each Product Headstart comprises a set of strains that have undergone in silico, in vitro, and in some cases, in planta characterization focused on a specific product application. Even for partners that turn to in-licensing for portfolio growth, Product Headstarts offer the advantage of choice – partners work with Ginkgo to steer product specifications including application method and formulation. As innovation partners we work in tandem to set the standard for efficacy and consistency.
We launched our Rapid Strain Optimization services for ag biologicals this year, and both Agrivalle and AgBiome are utilizing these services to provide growers with better performing biologicals – up to 5x improved performance – using methods that are favored by regulators worldwide. Learn more about our proprietary technology underpinning this service offering in this recording of our Rapid Strain Optimization virtual event.
Novelty is key when it comes to developing plant traits. Ginkgo’s proprietary metagenomic database, our machine-learning guided protein design and optimization capabilities and our ultra-high throughput screening technologies underpin our Plant Trait services.
Contact us to learn more about these services.
Looking forward to next year
Next year, we’ll be launching new service offerings for biochemical production through fermentation. Naturally-secreted metabolites have tremendous potential as crop protection and nutrient use inputs. Many of these molecules can be produced by fermentation-friendly microbes. What’s more, this production method often enjoys wider regulatory acceptance as compared to whole microbial biologicals.
Ginkgo’s platform offers a range of unique benefits to help partners scale up biochemical production. First, we’ve optimized chassis strains with high flux across a range of small molecule classes: aromatics, terpenes, organic acids, amino acids – starting points for biochemistry that can impact crop protection and nutrition. Second, our pathway optimization and metabolic engineering capabilities lean on heavily automated workflows and troves of proprietary data relating gene sequences to function and structure.
If you’re curious about these services now, don’t hesitate to contact us using the form below!
We’re also excited to meet ag biologicals leaders and plant traits developers at conferences next year. Let us know if you’ll be attending any of the World Agritech conferences, ABIM or other great meetings in 2024!
