Page 5 - INC Magazine-November 2018

p its genome, you can
induce a yeast cell to
produce rose oil, which Ginkgo
does for perfume manu­
facturers. “Our job is to get the
microbe to do what the cus­
tomer wants,” Kelly says.
“It’s looking at biology from the
viewpoint of a programmer.”
Kelly founded Ginkgo in
2008 with three classmates
from his PhD program at MIT—
Reshma Shetty, Barry Canton,
and Austin Che—and their
professor, Tom Knight, one of
the pioneers of the field now
known as synthetic biology.
When they first worked together
seven years earlier, the science
was roughly where computers
were in the 1950s. But as the
sequencing and printing of DNA
have gotten radically cheaper,
“synbio” is making its way into
industries from fashion to food
to cannabis. Investors and
customers are taking note. To
date, Ginkgo has raised more
than $400 million. “Customers
are coming up to us, saying,
‘Program me a GMO to do
something,’ ” says Kelly. Ginkgo
is doing just that with Bayer,
in a $100 million joint venture
that will develop microbes
that eliminate the need to use
nitrogen fertilizer on corn crops.
—J.B.

on Ice
A Ginkgo Bioworks staffer
reaches for some of the company’s
biological material, which is so delicate it
must be stored at subzero temperatures.