Recent News

January 10th 2012

Ginkgo to expand operations to a new 11,565 SF facility in the Boston Innovation District

A world-class organism engineering pipeline that is growing fast needs a world-class facility and room to expand. With that in mind, Ginkgo is happy to announce we will be moving to an all new 11,565 SF facility in early March. We are delighted to be staying in the Boston Innovation district that has served us so well. We look forward to joining our life sciences neighbors including Cambrian Innovation, Novophage, and Dana Farber Cancer Institute in the Drydock Center.

With three times as much space, we are laying out a dedicated production facility separate from our R&D labs and the general hustle and bustle of Ginkgo. As we transition biological engineering from a handcraft to an industrial process, we believe infrastructure, operations, and process engineering are critical. Our new facility has the infrastructure we need and is laid out to support the operations of a next-generation organism engineering pipeline. And our view of Boston Harbor will be even better!

October 20st 2011

Ginkgo BioWorks joins the Wyss Institute at Harvard University in $3.7M contract to develop a Genetic Security System for DARPA

The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University announced today that it has been awarded a $3.7 million contract (including option) from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a genetic security system that would track an organism's history.

The proposed DNA-based memory device would sit inside a bacterium and create a permanent record of its historical experiences in much the same way as the "Track Changes" feature of word-processing software records successive edits in an electronic document. Such a bacterial background check would be analogous to biological forensic tools, such as fingerprint analysis, DNA testing, and blood typing.

The DARPA project will be led by Wyss Institute core faculty member Pamela Silver, who is a professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and the first Director of Harvard's Program in Systems Biology. Co-Principal Investigators will be James Collins, also a Wyss Institute core faculty member as well as professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University, and Jason Kelly, a founder and Principal Scientist at the Boston-based startup Ginkgo Bioworks.

The project team is charged with overseeing development of a bacterial memory system that actively reports on and tracks the history and status of an organism, providing information on its specific experiences, such as exposure to an antibiotic. This type of tracking system could protect commodity biomanufacturing by tracking the theft of proprietary bacterial strains that have been metabolically engineered to produce high-value products, such as biofuels or chemicals. It could also enhance the security of bacteria that are being studied in laboratory settings and discourage the misuse of dangerous biological pathogens.

The device would need to be robust enough to function in the field, while also maintaining accurate historical records in the face of a wide range of environmental stresses, including the death of the bacterium that it is charged with tracking. "This would be one of the first DNA-based memory systems to accurately track bacteria and it represents just the kind of challenging -- and potentially game-changing -- work that we do best here at the Wyss Institute," said Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber, MD, Ph.D. "We are happy to collaborate with DARPA in creating a new way to help ensure that bacterial strains created for science and industry are not misused in ways that could harm people or endanger our access to important products."

May 2011

Ginkgo BioWorks successfully completes milestone-based $4.1M contract for ITI Life Sciences.

Ginkgo BioWorks announced the on-time completion and approval of all technical milestones in our 18 month contract with ITI Life Sciences. Ginkgo conducted this work in partnership with the lab of Will Shu at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. Ginkgo developed a new biochemical process for the in vitro assembly of many fragments of DNA in a "one-pot" chemical reaction.

August 2010

Ginkgo BioWorks awarded $6.6M from DOE to engineer new "Electrofuels" organism that converts electricity into liquid fuels

The central challenge in renewable fuels is finding a feedstock that is cost-competitive with oil. Sugar from corn, sugar cane, and other food crops is too expensive and competes with food markets. Algae has repeatedly failed to gain traction due to challenges with photobioreactors and low yields. All these approaches are plagued by the ineffeciency of photosynthesis in capturing the energy of sunlight. Electrofuels removes this reliance on photosynthesis by using electricity as the energy source.

Ginkgo BioWorks has teamed up with Jay Keasling from the University of Berkeley and Mary Lidstrom and David Baker from the University of Washington to complete the $6.6M DOE ARPA-E contract. The team will develop an organism for the production of fuels using only CO2 and electricity as feedstocks. Solar panels are more efficient than photosynthesis at capturing sunlight and are improving dramatically.

Vinod Khosla recently commented on Electrofuels saying that "these efforts are extremely early, and may yield something ground-breaking." Ginkgo expects to begin scale-up of these organisms beyond the bench by the end of 2012.

September 2009

Ginkgo BioWorks Tapped for $4.1M Synthetic DNA Effort

Reprinted from Xconomy.

Boston-based synthetic biology startup Ginkgo BioWorks has been selected as one of two entities to support a Scottish initiative to find better ways to assemble synthetic DNA, according to ITI Life Sciences, which has committed $4.1 million to the effort. ITI Life Sciences is a unit of ITI Scotland, a firm that was formed in 2003 by the government of Scotland to help grow industries in the country such as life sciences, energy, and digital media. Ginkgo BioWorks was launched in 2008 by five MIT scientists and researchers to make the construction of synthetic DNA easier and faster, according to its website.