Governments

Overview

Catalyzing biological innovations to solve today’s hardest challenges

Ginkgo’s world-class synthetic biology platform provides resilient, sustainable, and innovative solutions to the challenges facing our society and world. Our range of capabilities combines computational design and ultra high throughput genetic engineering and screening with expertise in process development and manufacturing scale up. Ginkgo helps your R&D agencies, programs, and initiatives meet their goals, critically enabling capabilities governments need to respond to today’s challenges and deliver the promises of tomorrow.

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

Prevent, detect, deter, and respond.
Protect your people, environment, and country.

From algorithms for detecting genetically engineered samples to passive pathogen monitoring at international transit hubs to medical countermeasures development, Ginkgo is a trusted partner to government agencies as they work to protect people, supply chains, and the environment.

We are the only biotechnology company in the U.S. with a dedicated biosecurity and public health unit—Concentric by Ginkgo. Our services enable the discovery, optimization, and scale up for a wide range of biosecurity, bioinformatics, and cell engineering projects. See below for a selection of our application areas and featured projects.

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Select Application Areas

Advanced Materials

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Advanced Materials

Our synthetic biology platform allows our partners to access a large variety of chemistries and biochemistries critical to material formulations including fuels and lubricants, polymers, composites, textiles, and infrastructure materials.

Biomolecules developed using Ginkgo’s platform can serve as replacements for petrochemicals or provide chemical functionalities that are unique to biological systems, enabling the development of novel materials with never-before-seen properties. Whether your starting material is a metabolite, protein, lipid, carbohydrate, or whole cells, we can help build biological systems that produce what you need.

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Biodetection & Biosurveillance

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Biodetection & Biosurveillance

Globalization has enabled the rapid transmission of disease-causing agents, and the effects of climate change are unearthing and accelerating exposure to new pathogens for humans, animals, and plants alike. 

Through our biosecurity and public health unit, Concentric by Ginkgo, we have responded to this challenge by building rapid testing networks for specific and non-specific pathogen detection, including hospital-relevant antibiotic-resistant strains. 

Government agency customers can leverage: 

  • Our proprietary software to detect genetically engineered samples

  • Our peptide, protein, or RNA-based biorecognition element design and testing capabilities for improving products including diagnostic tests

  • Our biosynthetic pathways for signal generation and amplification for biosurveillance of hospitals, schools, farms, transport hubs, and government installations
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Medical Countermeasures

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Medical Countermeasures

COVID-19 highlighted our need for more immediate access to medicines and supplies for disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. The ability to respond to the pandemic was based on a foundation of government-funded research in counter-threat agent technologies.

Partner with Ginkgo to respond to biological threats by accessing our capabilities in optimizing and scaling up biological solutions including vaccines, antivirals, antimicrobials, and enzyme systems that degrade toxins to create deployable countermeasures.

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Bioremediation, Biodegradation & Biomining

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Bioremediation, Biodegradation & Biomining

Biological systems have evolved naturally over billions of years to detoxify and degrade substances in the environment. The chemistries and functionalities of these systems are ripe for utilization and optimization for human needs.

Ginkgo is uniquely positioned to provide new solutions in bioremediation, biodegradation, and biomining of critical materials including rare earth elements through the characterization of naturally occurring organisms and microbial communities as well as through protein design and engineering. Ginkgo can partner with your agency to develop and implement high throughput screens to rapidly identify and prototype organisms, proteins, and processes that enhance bioremediation and biodegradation in the public interest.

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Enabling the Circular Bioeconomy

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Enabling the Circular Bioeconomy

At Ginkgo, we’re passionate about enabling the ability to generate renewable natural capital while minimizing waste and replacing petroleum-based products. Not only can government customers capitalize on our capabilities with regard to biodegradation, they can also leverage Ginkgo’s biosynthetic design and system characterization capabilities and tools to create solutions to the challenges of waste valorization, dewatering, and upcycling.

Enabling the circular bioeconomy will require connecting innovations from R&D projects, engaging the public and private sectors, and scaling technologies—Ginkgo is here to help.

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Carbon Capture

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Carbon Capture

Plant microbiome engineering can improve plant growth and drive more carbon fixation and sequestration. Ginkgo’s vast soil microbe database and greenhouse testbed facilities can be harnessed to better understand how microbial communities impact soil carbon content.

Ginkgo is also developing microbes that can use C1 compounds as their sole feedstocks, simultaneously utilizing CO2 and methane, and reducing the carbon footprint of fermentation by avoiding high-impact feedstocks like dextrose and glucose.

Distributed Manufacturing

Pilot scale fermentation tank bioreactors

Distributed Manufacturing

By leveraging distributed manufacturing and pairing it with our expertise in fermentation and strain engineering, Ginkgo can contribute to the development of technologies that strengthen local manufacturing while also helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address climate change.

Production of biologically derived products at smaller, more localized scales can help reduce transportation costs and emissions associated with the transport of bulk materials, as well as the energy consumption of large centralized facilities.

Ginkgo has engineered microbes to metabolize diverse feedstocks such as agricultural residues, transforming landfill-destined biomass into fuels and high value chemicals. Our expertise in designing strains for atypical fermentation environments allows us to develop microorganisms that can thrive in challenging environments including power plants and industrial facilities.

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Microbiomes

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Microbiomes

Ginkgo can characterize microbial communities and engineer or evolve strains that play a role in important microbiomes. We have experimented with modulating parts of the human skin microbiome to consume attractant metabolites and produce repellents for disease-carrying insects and can help government customers explore microbiome-altering medicines or probiotics to improve gut, skin, and lung function.

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Food & Nutrition

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Food & Nutrition

Flavorings, foods, and nutritive profiles that optimize nutrition and microbiome health and reduce climate impacts are increasingly important in building a sustainable and equitable future across the globe. This includes meals-ready-to-eat (MREs) that can be consumed by both deployed soldiers or astronauts and displaced persons. Ginkgo can help create healthier and more sustainable food products by rapidly prototyping and optimizing microorganisms to produce natural flavor compounds and other functional ingredients, such as protein alternatives or nutritional additives.

We can also help government agencies ensure the safety of their food supply chain by developing and optimizing tools for pathogen detection and surveillance. As a leader in the synthetic biology industry, Ginkgo’s expertise can be a resource for governments, helping to develop solutions to strengthen food safety, create more sustainable products, and create products made to weather challenging environments—from the battlefield to the space station.

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How to Access Ginkgo

Your mission is our mission: Ginkgo’s government team can work with you to find the right contracting vehicle and optimal intellectual property terms to help you achieve your program’s goals. The U.S. federal government can access Ginkgo’s innovative biological solutions through our participation in a number of government-wide acquisition contracts (GWACs) and indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts, other transaction authorities (OTAs) and consortia, and manufacturing innovation institutes (MIIs). 

GWACs/IDIQs

  • Joint Enterprise Research, Development, Acquisition and Procurement (JE-RDAP) IDIQ

OTAs/Consortia

  • Medical CBRN Defense Consortium (MCDC)
  • Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing Preparedness Consortium (BioMaP-Consortium)
  • Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (C-WMD)
  • Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium (MTEC)
  • The Consortium for Energy, Environment and Demilitarization (CEED)

MIIs

  • BioIndustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem (BioMADE)

Partner with us.

Ginkgo collaborates with academia, national labs, small businesses, and other commercial organizations to provide our government customers with the right teams to deliver successful outcomes. Reach out to discuss potential partnerships and to learn how our industry-leading platform, processes, relationships, and technologies can accelerate your government-facing solutions.

Get in touch with the Ginkgo team today!

Speak with Us

Start a project today.

We program cells—enabling governments to protect and grow the future of medicine, materials, food, and more.

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What We Do

Featured Projects & News

Ginkgo is your end-to-end synthetic biology R&D partner. Browse a selection of our partner projects and case studies to explore how our services are being used across industries.

Speak to our team today to learn more.

Enzymes

Whether you’re looking for a biocatalyst to replace a chemical synthesis step, looking to improve your enzyme’s function, or aiming to lower your manufacturing costs, Ginkgo’s best-in-class enzyme capabilities empower your R&D.

Enzymes

Optimizing Crucial Drug Manufacturing of APIs with Merck

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Improving the Specificity and Activity of a Biocatalyst

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Enzyme Discovery Powered by Large Metagenomic Libraries

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Optimizing Enzyme Expression and Performance with Zymtronix

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Advancing Treatments for Orphan and Rare Diseases with Selecta Biosciences

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Improving the Manufacture of Biosynthetic Heparin with Optimvia

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Developing Water Quality Biosensors with FREDSense

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Investigational Synthetic Biotic Medicine for Homocystinuria with Synlogic

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Digital collage of live bacterial biotherapeutics

Discovering Novel Live Biotherapeutics with Microba

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Developing High-Efficacy Adjuvants for Vaccines with SaponiQx

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New Platform Ventures: Launching Verb Biotics, Ayana Bio

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Developing Synthetic Biotics for Gout with Synlogic

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Accelerating Production of Essential Medicines with Antheia

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Optimizing the Brightness of Glowing Plants with Light Bio

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Proteins

Discover and synthesize novel functional proteins, optimize your protein production, or enhance processes to scale up your protein manufacturing: Ginkgo’s best-in-class protein capabilities empower your R&D.

Proteins

High Throughput Screening for Designing Novel CAR-T Cell Therapies

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Developing Next-Generation Gene Therapy Capsids with Selecta Biosciences

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Improving the Manufacture of Biosynthetic Heparin with Optimvia

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Optimizing Silk Protein Production with Bolt Threads

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Developing Water Quality Biosensors with FREDSense

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Engineering Living Biotherapeutics for Gastrointestinal Health with Tantu

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A New Modality of Medicine: Nucleic Acid Vaccines

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Metabolic Engineering

Leverage Ginkgo’s expertise in metabolic engineering and our foundry scale to program microorganisms to manufacture your molecule of interest.

Metabolic Engineering

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Unlocking the Potential of Expression Systems for Medicines with Novo Nordisk

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Aliquots

Optimizing Production of Biobased Speciality Chemicals with Lygos

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Producing Rare, Natural Ingredients with Givaudan

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Sustainable Beauty and Personal Care Products with Sumitomo Chemical

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Metabolic Engineering for Lower Cost Feedstocks

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Commercializing Cultured Ingredients with Robertet

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

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Scaling Production of Cultured THCV with Cronos Group

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Ultra High Throughput Genome Engineering for the Production of Specialty Chemicals

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Accelerating Industrial Adoption of High-Performance Biomaterials with Cambium

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Biobased Alternatives to Synthetic Polymers with Bioweg

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Developing High-Efficacy Adjuvants for Vaccines with SaponiQx

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Developing Water Quality Biosensors with FREDSense

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Improving Production Efficiency for Vibrant Food Colors with Phytolon

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Optimizing the Brightness of Glowing Plants with Light Bio

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New Platform Ventures: Launching Verb Biotics, Ayana Bio

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Strain Optimization

Increase your titers, improve your strain’s robustness in harsh conditions, or evolve it to grow on more cost-effective inputs: Ginkgo’s best-in-class strain optimization services can help deliver on your goals.

Strain Optimization

Manufacturing Breakthrough for mRNA Raw Materials with Aldevron

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Strain Improvement for Sustainable Agriculture with Bayer

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Ginkgo Expands Agricultural Biologicals Division, Closes Deal with Bayer

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Optimizing Crucial Drug Manufacturing of APIs with Merck

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Colorful yeast in plate

Unlocking the Potential of Expression Systems for Medicines with Novo Nordisk

Learn more

Supporting COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Development with Moderna

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

Learn more

Ultra High Throughput Genome Engineering for the Production of Specialty Chemicals

Learn more

Accelerating Production of Essential Medicines with Antheia

Learn more

Biobased Alternatives to Synthetic Polymers with Bioweg

Learn more

Developing High-Efficacy Adjuvants for Vaccines with SaponiQx

Learn more

Developing Next-Generation Gene Therapy Capsids with Selecta Biosciences

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Engineering Bacteria for Cancer Patient Treatment with Prokarium

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A very fine illustration in green of an X-rayed T. rex with a bundle of E. coli in an inset circle and the word Sue written in cursive overlayed on top of everything

Developing Synthetic Biotics for Gout with Synlogic

Learn more

Developing Water Quality Biosensors with FREDSense

Learn more
Digital collage of live bacterial biotherapeutics

Discovering Novel Live Biotherapeutics with Microba

Learn more

Engineering Living Biotherapeutics for Gastrointestinal Health with Tantu

Learn more

Genes × Jeans: Accelerating Production of Sustainable Dyes with Huue

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Improving Production Efficiency for Vibrant Food Colors with Phytolon

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Improving the Manufacture of Biosynthetic Heparin with Optimvia

Learn more

Investigational Synthetic Biotic Medicine for Homocystinuria with Synlogic

Learn more

Optimizing Enzyme Expression and Performance with Zymtronix

Learn more
Aliquots

Optimizing Production of Biobased Speciality Chemicals with Lygos

Learn more

Optimizing Silk Protein Production with Bolt Threads

Learn more

New Platform Ventures: Launching Verb Biotics, Ayana Bio

Learn more

High Throughput Screening for Designing Novel CAR-T Cell Therapies

Learn more

Accelerating Industrial Adoption of High-Performance Biomaterials with Cambium

Learn more

Producing Rare, Natural Ingredients with Givaudan

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Process Design & Scale Up

Utilize Ginkgo’s best-in-class scale up, processing, and production services at bench, pilot, and commercial scales. Ginkgo’s capabilities enable and improve the scaled production of your product.

Process Design & Scale Up

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

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Ginkgo Expands Agricultural Biologicals Division, Closes Deal with Bayer

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Manufacturing Breakthrough for mRNA Raw Materials with Aldevron

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Supporting COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Development with Moderna

Learn more

Scaling Production of Cultured THCV with Cronos Group

Learn more

Optimizing Crucial Drug Manufacturing of APIs with Merck

Learn more
Digital collage of live bacterial biotherapeutics

Discovering Novel Live Biotherapeutics with Microba

Learn more

Producing Rare, Natural Ingredients with Givaudan

Learn more

Developing High-Efficacy Adjuvants for Vaccines with SaponiQx

Learn more

Improving the Manufacture of Biosynthetic Heparin with Optimvia

Learn more

Launching Commercial Production of Cultured Cannabinoids with Cronos

Learn more

Optimizing Enzyme Expression and Performance with Zymtronix

Learn more

New Platform Ventures: Launching Verb Biotics, Ayana Bio

Learn more

Accelerating Industrial Adoption of High-Performance Biomaterials with Cambium

Learn more

Improving Production Efficiency for Vibrant Food Colors with Phytolon

Learn more

Strain Improvement for Sustainable Agriculture with Bayer

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Biosecurity

Biology-powered. Data-driven. People-centric. Ginkgo’s end-to-end platform provides the system and tools needed to prevent, detect, and respond to pathogens.

Biosecurity

Building a Global Bioradar System with Concentric by Ginkgo

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Tracking Pathogen Variants with Rwanda Biomedical Centre

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Developing Water Quality Biosensors with FREDSense

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Needle in a Haystack: Looking for Compounds to Treat COVID-19

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Frequently Asked Questions

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What do you mean when you say Ginkgo is a “platform”?

The Ginkgo platform consists of our Foundry (our automated facilities) and our Codebase (our accumulated knowledge). This platform is powered by Ginkgo’s people, a large, diverse team of experts in cell engineering, automation, analytics, fermentation, and more. When you partner with Ginkgo, you receive the full benefit of the $1.6 billion we raised when going public to bring together the tools, infrastructure, and people you need to discover, optimize, and scale your products. With a flexible, scalable lab unit operations connected by proprietary software that allows us to run high-throughput experiments and an ever-expanding set of cells, enzymes, data, models, and knowledge we use in every project, Ginkgo is solving the world’s most challenging problems, at scale and with resilience.

Across which technology and/or manufacturing levels (TRL/MRL) can Ginkgo provide solutions?

Through our collaborations with national labs, federally funded research centers, and academic partners, and our ecosystem of commercial industry partners, Ginkgo operates at both ends of the TRL and MRL spectrums. Ginkgo’s capabilities are especially powerful in Phases 1 and 2 of the MRL scale and can help our government customers navigate the so-called TRL “Valley of Death” (Stages 4 through 7) to efficiently ferry projects from ideas to implementation. 

Doesn’t Ginkgo lock down all of the IP associated with strains they build, making it effectively unusable by governments after development?

Nope! Ginkgo has deep experience partnering with government customers and understands government-use rights and other contracting terms inherent in working with governments. Our team of IP and legal specialists will work with you to find IP terms that are mutually beneficial.