Category: Industrials

Biobased Alternatives to Synthetic Polymers with Bioweg

Posted on by Ena Cratsenburg

Developing cost-effective biobased materials as clean alternatives to synthetic polymers

Today, we’re announcing a new collaboration with Bioweg, a producer of highly functional and customizable biobased materials. Our partnership aims to optimize the production of bacterial cellulose and to produce novel variants of cellulose with improved performance to serve a variety of end markets.

Bioweg’s products are made of biodegradable bacterial cellulose and have already been tested and implemented by companies as an effective substitute for widely used synthetic polymers such as acrylates, polyethylene, and polystyrene. Synthetic polymers often appear as microbeads (i.e., micropowders) and texturants (i.e., Rheology modifiers) in products throughout cosmetics, homecare, personal care, agricultural coatings, and other industries, which contribute to microplastic pollution in waters worldwide. It is estimated that an average person could be ingesting about 5 grams of plastic each week (PDF) through the consumption of common foods and beverages. These microplastics are non-biodegradable and may carry toxic chemicals. Regulatory agencies and communities around the world are starting to regulate microplastics contamination. Just last year, the European Chemical Agency announced phasing out microbeads in ‘rinse-off’ and ‘leave-on’ cosmetics.

Leveraging our strain engineering and screening capabilities to deliver biobased solutions at scale

“Consumers and companies are united in their commitment to finding better performing and more sustainable alternatives for everyday products to break the chain of microplastic pollution. Our solutions are not just tackling a major environmental, sustainability and health problem, but also present a robust market opportunity to replace plastic polymers in care, coatings, chemicals, and other industries,” said Prateek Mahalwar, CEO at Bioweg. “We believe Ginkgo’s strain engineering and screening capabilities can enable us to deliver our biobased solutions at scale and competitive pricing.”

Bioweg is addressing a significant need in the marketplace to develop and produce a new generation of clean alternatives to synthetic polymers. We are committed to supporting the shift to sustainable and biobased high-performance alternatives and are thrilled to be working with Bioweg to address the pressing issues of microplastics contamination and promote responsible consumption.

Find the full press release here along with all of the latest news from the Ginkgo team.

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

Optimizing Production of Biobased Speciality Chemicals with Lygos

Posted on by Ena Cratsenburg

Strain development program aims to accelerate efforts to create sustainable chemicals

Today we’re pleased to announce our multi-product research and development collaboration with Lygos. This partnership is designed to optimize and scale production of sustainable specialty ingredients that can replace toxic petrochemistry, reclaim local manufacturing, and advance industrial bio-innovation.

Together, we plan to advance two research and development programs over the course of approximately two years. Lygos’ organic acid targets are used to produce biodegradable formulations and polymer-based products used in consumer, agricultural and industrial markets. We at Ginkgo will leverage our extensive expertise in strain development and metabolic engineering as we work to rapidly design and optimize microorganisms that can convert low-cost sugar to high-value chemicals. This in turn can provide a more sustainable alternative to the traditional industrial chemicals that are made from petroleum-derived feedstock.

Creating sustainable biomanufacturing solutions

Many specialty organic acids rely on environmentally damaging and costly production processes. We’re excited to be working with Lygos to replace some of those harmful production methods with sustainable, environmentally friendly biomanufacturing processes. Ginkgo is committed to creating solutions that are better for the planet, and this partnership with Lygos will help advance our initiatives around climate sustainability while supporting domestic manufacturing and technology development.

“Lygos and Ginkgo have been at the forefront of this field, enabling customers to create sustainable products that can help solve the world’s environmental challenges and improve everyday products,” said Eric Steen, PhD, CEO at Lygos.  “The new partnership will enable us to augment our development timelines, allocate more research and development, and accelerate our product commercialization programs.”

Find the full press release here along with all of the latest news from the Ginkgo team.

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

Enhancing Biomaterials with Bolt Threads

Posted on by Jason Kelly

The new program builds on our existing work with Bolt Threads optimizing their b-silk protein

Today we’re announcing a multi-project collaboration with Bolt Threads, a biotechnology company creating the next generation of advanced materials, to increase the production efficiency and performance of their portfolio of products and to develop additional novel proteins for their biomaterials. The first program in this collaboration aims to optimize the production efficiency of Bolt’s Mylo™ material, a leather alternative material made out of mycelium, the underground root-like system of fungi.

Mylo is an animal-free, sustainable alternative to leather grown from mycelium 

Through Bolt Threads’ production process, mycelium grows into a foamy layer that, once harvested, can be dyed and processed into sheets of material that can be customized to desired size, color, shape, and thicknesses. Mylo can be used in footwear, handbags, wallets, phone cases, and other products; the product is already used by brands like adidas, Stella McCartney, GANNI, and lululemon. Unlike traditional leather made from animal hides, mycelium leather does not rely on raising livestock, and unlike synthetic leather, Mylo isn’t petroleum-derived.

Through this collaboration, we aim to increase the growth rate of Bolt’s mycelium strain, lowering the overall production costs of Mylo. This collaboration also marks an expansion of our current work together, as we are already optimizing the sustainability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of Bolt Threads’ b-silk™ protein manufacturing process.

Over the last few years, the largest fashion brands worldwide and the textiles industry have collectively recognized the need to develop more sustainable and low-footprint materials. Bolt Threads is at the forefront of this shift, and Mylo represents this future. We are excited to leverage our Foundry and Codebase to help drive down the cost of producing Mylo, making the product more accessible to a variety of markets where innovative and exciting alternative materials can be used.

“Ginkgo’s expertise in engineering biology has enabled us to accelerate our work transforming the clean beauty and personal care industries with b-silk protein,” said David Breslauer, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Bolt Threads. “We are thrilled to be partnering with them again to optimize the production of our mycelium technology which will help make Mylo more accessible to consumers and brands alike.”

Find the full press release here along with all of the latest news from the Ginkgo team.

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

Sustainable Beauty and Personal Care Products with Sumitomo Chemical

Posted on by Patrick Boyle

Ginkgo and Sumitomo Chemical aim to create products that will bring significant benefits to consumers by supplying an ingredient that is animal-free and more sustainable than what’s currently on the market.

Ginkgo Bioworks started working with Sumitomo Chemical Co., Ltd, one of Japan’s leading chemical companies, in June 2021 to help significantly increase the production efficiency and sustainability of bio-based commercial products across a broad array of industries. Today, we’re pleased to announce a second collaboration. The new project plans to target a molecule intended to enable the introduction of more sustainable and cost-competitive products in the personal care and cosmetic industries. This molecule is envisioned to augment or replace an ingredient that is currently gathered from animal sources—a process which is not sustainable and also unappealing to many consumers—by producing it via fermentation instead.

What if you could grow ingredients instead of using animal sources?

“The cosmetics industry is demanding more sustainable and cost-competitive beauty and personal care products, as are many others we serve and we see tremendous potential in synthetic biology’s ability to make this possible at a commercial scale,” said Hiroshi Ueda, Executive Vice President of Sumitomo Chemical. “We’re encouraged by the progress of our ongoing first project with Ginkgo, and we believe it’s clear from how well our teams collaborate that we will also be able to find success within additional product areas as well. Through this project, we aim to build our own capability on fermentation production with, active involvement of our new organization SynBio Hub.”

Ginkgo’s platform provides unique advantages thanks to its growing codebase.

Not only is this project a natural fit for Ginkgo’s platform, but it provides the perfect opportunity to leverage and showcase our growing codebase. Ginkgo has prior experience developing a precursor molecule to the one Sumitomo Chemical is currently targeting. The data and experience Ginkgo has on this precursor molecule has significantly accelerated our current program with Sumitomo Chemical, possibly saving Sumitomo Chemical multiple years off its development timeline.

Find the full press release here along with all of the latest news from the Ginkgo team.

Developing Water Quality Biosensors with FREDSense

Posted on by Jason Kelly

Ginkgo’s strain development capabilities to help develop advanced biosensors

Today, we’re excited to announce our partnership with FREDsense Technologies Corp, a next generation water quality platform company leveraging synthetic biology to build field kits for faster, cheaper, and more efficient analysis. Through this partnership, we seek to build four distinct microbial strain biosensors, compatible with FREDsense’s field-ready hardware for remote water quality monitoring applications.

Demand for scalable monitoring and testing systems has increased, as water quality becomes an ever-growing environmental and public health concern. Conventional water quality test results are often delayed, since samples must be transported to labs for chemical analysis. FREDsense builds portable solutions to efficiently assess the chemicals in the water at the source. This allows for rapid modification of water treatment processes in real-time without the need for external lab equipment.

Supporting real-time field detection of harmful molecules and toxins in any water source

The biosensors in development by Ginkgo aim to support real-time field detection of harmful molecules, and may be used to generate solutions for groundwater and industrial water management systems.

Partnering with FREDsense is an exciting opportunity to apply our strain development capabilities to powerful biosensor technology for an important application. Protecting our water sources is a mission critical initiative: life on this planet as we know it depends on it. We’re eager to work toward enhancing the capabilities of FREDsense’s platform to monitor for harmful contaminants in water.

“Water is our most critical resource, and we now have the technology to detect in real-time many of the threats or contaminants that can impact the water that our environments and communities depend on,” says David Lloyd, CEO of FREDsense. “Through this partnership with Ginkgo, we aim to introduce rapid, simple and accurate testing to deliver water quality monitoring systems to those that most need it. We believe that synthetic biology is the key to solving some of the biggest challenges facing the water industry globally and are very excited to partner with Ginkgo on this vision.”

Find the full press release here along with all of the latest news from the Ginkgo team.

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

Synthetic Biology for Climate Action

Posted on by Jason Kelly

We believe synthetic biology has an important role to play in addressing climate change.

Climate change is a global threat that requires immediate action. It’s already impacting every single person and living thing on our planet. The best time to address climate change was decades ago; the next best time? Now. So, what are we waiting for? Let’s go grow!

Limiting warming to below 1.5°C will require us to reimagine our industrial landscapes to eliminate emissions and to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. Decarbonizing our energy, materials, chemicals, and food production will require massive shifts in how we make stuff.

We believe that synthetic biology has an important role to play in this climate transition, whether it’s the resilience of ecosystems and communities to a changing climate, the reduction of emissions through circular manufacturing, or the sequestration of carbon through soil, oceanic, lithospheric, or anthropogenic sinks. We believe synthetic biology is going to be one of the enabling technologies for this revolution.

Biology is natively the technology of climate: it makes our air, makes our food, and cleans our water. We believe the ability to engineer biology is ultimately the biggest climate technology in the world.

What are we waiting for? Let’s go grow!

Last week, we hosted a virtual event with several key thought leaders in the world of synthetic biology for climate tech. Over 650 people from the wider synthetic biology and climate tech communities tuned in to share their work and excitement. The panelists discussed carbon fixation and sequestration pathways, manufacturing scale up, and new business models for carbon capture. You can check out the recording of the main stage above or on Ginkgo’s YouTube channel.

Bill Gates recently said that climate tech will create 8 to 10 trillion dollar-scale companies. We believe that at least a few of those will be synthetic biology companies. You may be starting one of those companies right now—we’d love to help you accelerate your climate tech R&D with the tools of our platform. Reach out!

Accelerating Industrial Adoption of High-Performance Biomaterials with Cambium

Posted on by Ena Cratsenburg

We help companies across industries use synthetic biology to produce better, more sustainable products. Product developers are looking for sustainable alternatives to petrochemical-based materials while also looking to achieve unmet performance needs. Biomaterials can offer an answer to both of these needs; that’s why we’re excited about our new partnership with Cambium Biomaterials as they grow and bring next-gen biomaterials to market.

Cambium is redefining products by creating high-performance biomaterials that deliver step changes in performance and sustainability to industries as diverse as aerospace and renewable energy.

Cambium will leverage Ginkgo’s Codebase and high-throughput facility to accelerate their discovery, development, manufacturing, and commercialization of biomaterials that deliver superior performance and sustainability across a range of industries.

The initial cell programs will focus on materials that provide enhanced heat, flame, laser, and sensor protection.

Cambium designs new functional biomaterials and composites for use in diverse and extreme environments. They’ll work with Ginkgo to explore a diverse set of bio-based molecules and develop a library of bio-building blocks to support the manufacture of innovative biomaterial end products.

By enabling the design of organisms that can produce valuable biological products, Ginkgo helps accelerate the development of innovative, bio-based solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. This partnership deepens Ginkgo’s involvement in the biomaterials space following the launch of recent cell programs with other leading biomaterials companies.

Simon Waddington, CEO and co-founder at Cambium, shared: “We are excited to work with Ginkgo to not only expand the universe of these materials but also explore how to make them biologically. We expect this partnership to grow our pipeline and accelerate our commercialization timeline.”

Genes × Jeans: Accelerating Production of Sustainable Dyes with Huue

Posted on by James Waters

Blue jeans — a staple in many people’s wardrobes — are worn around the world. Billions of pairs are produced annually, and a key component is the dye responsible for their iconic color: indigo. A rich blue hue, it’s what makes a pair of jeans instantly recognizable. Much of today’s indigo dye is chemically synthesized instead of being sourced from the various plants that produce it. (Fun fact: plants aren’t the only biological source of indigo dye; some marine animals like mollusks produce it too!) Unfortunately, the most commonly used chemical manufacturing process for making indigo is responsible for over 1.4 million metric tons of CO₂ and utilizes toxic chemicals including benzene, formaldehyde, and sodamide.

Thankfully, we can turn to synthetic biology to give us another way to make this valuable dye. Microbes — just like plants and other organisms — can produce indigo dye. All they need is the right code. Our newest partner Huue is a biotech startup that’s programming microbes to produce sustainable dyes like indigo for the fashion industry and beyond.

Huue plans to leverage Ginkgo’s platform to optimize the production of microbial strains capable of producing sustainable dyes such as indigo.

Using its proprietary biosynthetic dye-making process, Huue produces indigo that’s just as effective as conventional solutions — without the environmental impact and harmful chemicals. The Huue team plans to leverage our microbial engineering platform, including our strain optimization capabilities, to improve their microbial strains. Huue’s goal is to accelerate production of their dyes for their first partners in 2021 and 2022.

Ginkgo serves customers across industries who are seeking to develop new and better products using biology. We’re thrilled to welcome Huue onto our platform and are excited to work on their product-focused cell programs. We believe that synthetic biology has incredible power to help virtually any industry reimagine how they approach product innovation and enable teams to bring sustainable practices to historically toxic manufacturing processes. We’re honored to be able to support innovators like Huue develop and grow their cell programs that are helping build a more sustainable world.

Michelle Zhu, the CEO and co-founder at Huue shared our excitement: “We’re excited to work with a sustainability-minded company like Ginkgo Bioworks to bring the world’s first sustainable and scalable indigo to the denim industry. The planet can’t wait any longer for sustainable solutions, and it’s through partnerships like this one that we’re accelerating the production of our bio-based dyes for the industries that need them the most.”

Organizations, government agencies, and companies across numerous industries use Ginkgo’s cell programming platform to find more effective, environmentally friendly ways to create products including food ingredients, fragrances, cosmetics, medicines, and more. By enabling the design of organisms that can produce valuable biological products, Ginkgo helps accelerate the development of innovative, bio-based solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.