Category: Strain Optimization Services

Enhancing Meaty Taste of Mycoprotein with Nosh.bio

Posted on by Ginkgo Bioworks

 

Today we’re so excited to announce a new partnership with Nosh.bio, a German startup developing highly functional ingredients from fungal biomass for animal-free products. Nosh.bio will leverage our Ginkgo Strain Optimization Services to screen for protein-producing fungi strains with superior sensorial profiles. By leveraging Ginkgo’s ultra high throughput encapsulated screening capabilities, the program aims to produce a mycoprotein that delivers a rich, savory, and natural meaty taste when used in food products.

The Challenges with Animal-Free Protein

Companies developing animal-free protein still face challenges in creating tastier, less processed, and affordable alternative-protein products. Nosh.bio has built a technological platform that uses fungal biomass to create animal-free single-ingredient animal meat alternatives from mycoprotein for human nutrition.

For meat-alternatives, red meat — like a juicy steak — remains the most challenging product to be developed, and current alternatives contain many ingredients and chemical additives. Nosh.bio aims to leverage their highly efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective production process to create a single-ingredient animal-free product that tastes and feels just like red meat, while being healthier than an animal product.

Ginkgo Strain Optimization Services

To enable this advanced alt-protein product, Ginkgo aims to discover and deliver a strain of fungi with higher native proteins involved in achieving the rich meat taste, juiciness, and color that Nosh.bio is seeking. To do so, we plan to execute a mutagenesis and screening campaign with our proprietary encapsulation and screening technology (EncapS). This can make it possible to search through up to 1 million strain variants in a single run and select the best performing candidates for further development. Using such an improved strain can help Nosh.bio develop a mycoprotein that is superior in taste, color, performance, and nutrition.

“Nosh.bio is eager to enable the transition from animal-based to animal-free products. Our affordable, high quality plant-based ingredients can build a product that’s even closer to meat in taste and texture than alt-protein options currently on the market,” said Tim Fronzek, CEO and Co-Founder of Nosh.bio. “What really excites us about partnering with Ginkgo is their accelerated screening technology that can help us pinpoint and develop a super ‘meaty’ mycoprotein.”

Leveling Up the Alt-Meat Protein Industry

We’re thrilled to partner with Nosh.bio and help level-up the alt-meat protein industry to deliver sustainable products that taste closer to real meat than ever before. Our proprietary encapsulation and screening technology can expeditiously deliver valuable insights that enable our partners to optimize their R&D efforts and overall product.

To learn more about Ginkgo Strain Optimization Services, please visit https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/offerings/strain-optimization-services/.

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

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

AgBiome Leverages Ginkgo Strain Optimization Services

Posted on by Magalie Guilhabert

Today we’re announcing a partnership with AgBiome, a leader in global microbial innovation.

The aim is to optimize the performance of products in AgBiome’s pipeline of agricultural biologicals. Organizations developing next generation agricultural inputs can access our platform to accelerate discovery and deployment of new products.

By leveraging Ginkgo’s Strain Optimization Services, AgBiome aims to provide growers with new and improved live microbial strain products.

The biological crop protection market has significantly grown in recent years. Growers have increasingly sought effective and sustainable alternatives to synthetic pest control products. By leveraging our suite of advanced biology tools, AgBiome aims to enhance the breadth and efficacy of novel biological products.

We believe we can identify improved variants at massive scale.

That can help deliver more potent agricultural biologicals and bring the next generation of products to market. We are thrilled to work with an industry leader like AgBiome as we seek to optimize live microbial strain products in their pipeline and provide even better solutions to growers around the world.

“AgBiome is committed to creating the most effective crop protection products, and we are always looking for new technologies to enable better performance. We are excited to utilize Ginkgo’s capabilities in ultra high throughput assay development to evolve the next generation of biologicals as we continue to provide growers with improved product efficacy.”

-Scott Uknes, Co-founder and Co-CEO of AgBiome

Ginkgo’s ultra high throughput encapsulated screening technology:

  • Makes it possible to search through up to 1 million strain variants in a single run
  • Selects the best performing candidates for further development
  • Is built on nanoliter encapsulation technology, and thus provides nanoscale growth and assay compartments
  • Makes it possible to greatly reduce the screening time for large libraries

 

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

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

Natural Colors with Octarine Bio

Posted on by Ena Cratsenburg

Strain engineering for violacein production

Today, we’re announcing a multi-stage partnership with Octarine Bio, a synthetic biology company developing new sustainable bio-based ingredients. We’ll work to engineer a strain to produce violacein – a naturally occurring pigment with anti-microbial, anti-oxidant, and UV protective properties.

The vast majority of textiles are still produced with synthetic colors and dyes derived from fossil fuels, a practice that has been linked to negative effects to human health and the environment.

Our expertise in strain engineering presents a significant opportunity for Octarine to introduce new bioactive colors and dyes to the market that address the consumer desires for safer, healthier, and more sustainable alternatives.

Contributing to the sustainability of the fashion industry

Natural colors and dyes constitute a significant and expanding market, especially given the heightened awareness from companies and the concerns of consumers about the harmful effects of conventional manufacturing processes. We are excited to be working with Octarine as we aim to produce a new class of safer, high-performing colors and dyes that will appeal to consumers and companies worldwide.

“We are thrilled to work with Ginkgo to improve the bio-based production process for our tryptophan program, focusing on a class of highly sought after natural colors and dyes in difficult to source color spectra. We see tremendous potential to apply these natural pigments as bio-based dyes, one of the fastest growing categories in the global textile market, and look forward to leveraging the Ginkgo platform to accelerate its development.”

Dr. Nethaji Gallage, Co-founder & CEO at Octarine

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

Sustainable, Carbon-Negative Materials with Visolis

Posted on by Ena Cratsenburg

Improving production of bio-based isoprene with Ginkgo strain optimization services

Today we are pleased to announce our partnership with Visolis, a company combining advanced bioengineering with chemical catalysis to provide sustainable, carbon-negative materials.

With this partnership, we aim to use our extensive capabilities in strain engineering to improve upon one of Visolis’ existing microbial strains. This strain produces a key feedstock ingredient used to make bio-based isoprene and sustainable aviation fuels.

Isoprene is a key monomer used for commercial scale synthetic rubber production. Achieving the production of bio-based isoprene at scale represents a significant step toward decarbonizing tire manufacturing. Isoprene can also be used as an intermediate for high performance, lower carbon intensity sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production. Visolis’ production efforts are geared towards providing molecules with higher energy density, lower viscosity and better compatibility with engines than traditional SAF processes. Visolis’ SAF has the potential to work synergistically with these other processes to enable aviation through a 100% sustainable fuel. Through our partnership, we are working together to further optimize the efficiency of this biomanufacturing process.

“We are incredibly proud of our platform that is producing carbon-negative materials and fuels,” said Deepak Dugar, founder and CEO at Visolis. “As we strive to continue improving our technology towards commercial readiness, partnering with Ginkgo to accelerate our progress just makes sense. With their large codebase of strains and pathway expertise, which can shorten strain engineering cycles, as well as their scalable foundry capabilities, we believe we can work towards bringing our process to the next level.”

Visolis has demonstrated early success in scaling production of isoprene because of their ingenuity in combining bioengineering and chemical processing. We’re thrilled to collaborate with Visolis to optimize this innovative and sustainable process with the power of synthetic biology. This is exactly the kind of positive change that bioengineering can bring to industry.

Get in touch with the Ginkgo team today to discuss your R&D challenges!

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

Optimizing Enzyme Expression and Performance with Zymtronix

Posted on by Ena Cratsenburg

Optimizing enzymes for Zymtronix’s cell-free manufacturing platform

Today we are pleased to announce our partnership with Zymtronix, a developer of cell-free process technologies. Together we aim to optimize enzymes used in Zymtronix’s proprietary cell-free platform for the production of important ingredients in food, agriculture, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.

Enzymatic biocatalysis is a powerful manufacturing technology that can enable the production of a wide range of chemicals and molecules. Zymtronix’s cell-free platform is designed to solve challenges associated with traditional biocatalysis and seeks to enable the production of a wide range of products with precision and productivity. By partnering with us to build and produce bioengineered market-ready enzymes, Zymtronix anticipates being able to extend its solutions into the pharma, nutrition, agriculture markets, among others.

Zymtronix aims to leverage Ginkgo Enzyme Services to discover, optimize, and produce enzymes

Ginkgo Enzyme Services offers partners end-to-end support for the discovery, optimization, and production of enzymes for diverse applications. Through the partnership, we will leverage our suite of enzyme services to engineer enzymes for Zymtronix’s applications using metagenomic enzyme discovery as well as improve enzyme expression and production host performance.

We’re thrilled to welcome Zymtronix to the platform and support their applications in sustainable ingredients and beyond. We’ve built out our platform to serve a wide variety of enzyme discovery, engineering, optimization and scale up efforts, and we’re so excited for the work to come in this partnership. Zymtronix’s cell-free biomanufacturing platform is pioneering solutions for various industries, and we’re eager to leverage our end-to-end capabilities and help expand its efforts in transforming the way enzymes are used.

“This partnership will greatly accelerate our work of bringing the precision and scalability of cell-free biomanufacturing and sustainable ingredients to market starting with alternatives to animal sources; Ginkgo is uniquely able to support us with both enzyme engineering and strain expression, helping us continue to accelerate commercialization,” said Stéphane Corgié, CEO-CTO and founder, Zymtronix. “We hope to extend this partnership in the future to facilitate the production of multiple end-market products.”

To learn more about Ginkgo Enzyme Services, please visit ginkgobioworks.com/enzyme-services/.

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

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

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?

Better Baby Formula with NAMUH

Posted on by Jason Kelly

Ginkgo will develop and optimize strains to produce functional oligosaccharides for NAMUH’s infant nutrition products

Today, we are pleased to announce a multi-product collaboration with NAMUH, an infant nutrition company, to develop functional oligosaccharides that are structurally identical to those found in human breast milk.

NAMUH’s mission is to create complete infant formula products substantially comparable to human breast milk, down to the molecular level. Human Milk Oligosaccharides (HMOs) are essential fiber-like nutrients unique to human milk that provide an important energy source to beneficial gut bacteria in infants. Despite being the third most abundant component in human milk, HMOs are currently a small component in infant formulas, if present at all.

Producing HMOs through yeast fermentation

Currently, NAMUH’s proprietary technology provides for a cost-effective source of a family of HMOs via yeast fermentation. NAMUH will leverage Ginkgo’s expertise in yeast strain engineering and fermentation process development through this partnership. Our aim is to enable the production of various HMOs through yeast fermentation and to unlock the possibility of making infant formula nutritionally robust and much closer to human breast milk.

NAMUH plans to leverage Ginkgo’s platform to develop and optimize strains

“Consumer demand for high quality, safe, infant nutrition products is growing, and NAMUH is thrilled to partner with Ginkgo to accelerate our market entry into this rapidly evolving category,” said Dr. Chaeyoung Shin, founder and CEO at NAMUH. “We believe engineering biology is the perfect way to produce crucial nutrients for babies, and together with Ginkgo, we are excited to play a key role in improving how future generations are fed.”

We seek out partners like NAMUH that are using biology to create category-leading products in legacy industries. Countless families around the world rely on infant formula every day, and we are thrilled to be working with NAMUH as they aim to create a healthier, safer formula that parents can depend on.

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

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

Engineering Bacteria for Cancer Patient Treatment with Prokarium

Posted on by Ena Cratsenburg

Partnership with Prokarium to discover multiple targets for RNA therapeutics and immuno-oncology

Today, we’re announcing a new partnership with Prokarium – a biopharmaceutical company pioneering the oncology field of microbial immunotherapy – to develop a bactofection platform to deliver RNA-based therapeutics.

Most gene therapies today use viral delivery systems, which may have limited utility due to toxicity and targeting issues. Bactofection, the process of transferring genetic material into a mammalian cell via a bacterium, is an alternative gene delivery system that could deliver therapeutic agents to a patient. In bactofection, the naturally occurring tumor-colonizing characteristics of bacterial species, such as Salmonella, can be modified via genetic manipulation and harnessed to be a targeted delivery vehicle for various therapeutic payloads.

Developing bactofection platform to treat cancer patients

In collaboration with Prokarium, Ginkgo will set out to engineer a Salmonella-based bactofection platform for the delivery of RNA payloads to treat cancer patients, building on existing capabilities in RNA therapeutics, viral-based gene therapy and bacterial therapeutics.

“By leveraging Ginkgo’s microbial and mammalian foundry capabilities, we are building a highly versatile and innovative bactofection platform to support delivery of novel modalities from the ground up,” said Kristen Albright, CEO at Prokarium. “Through this partnership, we are working to unlock a new generation of immuno-oncology therapeutics.”

Advancements in immunotherapy such as checkpoint inhibitors and CAR-T have transformed the treatment of certain cancers, with tremendous progress across novel modalities continuing to build. With Prokarium, we will work to develop a bactofection platform that leverages the convergence of these advancements in immuno-oncology, gene therapy, RNA therapeutics and bacterial therapeutics. We are  excited to bolster our work with leading companies like Prokarium, which can utilize our services to innovate and expand what is possible with novel therapeutics.

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

What will you grow with Ginkgo?

Celebrating Cronos Group’s First-of-a-Kind CBC Product

Posted on by Ginkgo Bioworks

Cronos Unveils its New CBC Product, the Spinach FEELZ™ Day Trip Gummies with THC+CBC, Developed on the Ginkgo Platform

We’re so excited to congratulate our customer Cronos – an innovative global cannabinoid company – for launching a CBC-focused product, the Spinach FEELZ™ THC+CBC Day Trip Mango Lime gummies, utilizing our platform for organism design and development.

The Spinach FEELZ™ Day Trip gummies are the first CBC gummy product in Canada and the first of its kind to feature a 3:1 ratio of CBC to THC. The product is currently available in Alberta and British Columbia and will be rolled out to additional provinces over the coming weeks:

  • SPINACH FEELZ™ THC+CBC DAY TRIP GUMMIES: Grab your bag, your friends and get going! A new day’s adventure awaits with Spinach FEELZ™ Day Trip gummies. From sun-up to sun-down, feel at ease and in tune with all the scents, sights, and sounds this glorious world has to offer. These one-of-a-kind THC+CBC gummies are packed with delicious mango-lime flavors and are sure to make for good times with friends. Five sour-then-sweet gummies with 10mg of THC and 30mg of CBC per pack.

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?