Inside Ginkgo, the gene factory where robots help make new weird synthetic organisms

Raising glasses of genetically modified beer, the synthetic biologists at Ginkgo Bioworks celebrated the launch of their new automated lab last month and you can take a virtual tour of their facility here. By applying engineering principles to biology, and with the help of some nifty robotic equipment, Ginkgo has created a factory for churning out exotic lifeforms - the likes of which have never before been seen on this planet.

The home brew was an example of the potential applications of synthetic biology - an emerging new industry that sits at the convergence of manufacturing and biology and that is the natural extension of recent breakthroughs in gene editing, gene modification and - more importantly - gene synthesis where scientists can create new genetic material, and new synthetic organisms from scratch. Translated - scientists can now manufacture snippets of synthetic DNA and slip them into organisms, giving those critters strange new capabilities. It signals the end of evolution and Darwinism as we know it.

For example, the brewer’s yeast used to make beer for the launch party had genes from an orange tree added to its own DNA. During the fermentation stage of the brewing process, those genes caused the yeast to produce Valencene, an organic compound with a citrusy flavour and speaking scientifically, of course, it's delicious.

Ginkgo Bioworks, a hip young company based in South Boston, recently raised $100 million on the promise of finding many such useful applications for synthetic biology. And it used some of that cash to build Bioworks2, the company’s vast new lab that uses robotic systems to make an assembly line for organisms.

Inside Bioworks2

Ginkgo needs to make microbes on a grand scale in order to find the ones that can function as tiny biological factories. When a client comes in with a request for a custom-made organism, Gingko begins its bulk experimentation. Many of the altered organisms will be duds, but through cycles of iteration the bioengineers eventually devise a microbe that turns out the desirable product. At the moment the company is experimenting with organisms that produce chemical ingredients for perfumes, beverages, pesticides, and laundry detergent, and all of that is just the beginning of a new revolution.

Ginkgo Bioworks’ business model centers on the microbes themselves, not the end products.

“We’re not in the business of manufacturing chemicals, flavours, or fragrances,” explains Ginkgo creative director Christina Agapakis.

“We specialize in the organsims, and we partner with our customers who will make the product.”

Ginkgo licenses organisms to its customers, she says, and gets royalties if they’re used.

But building an organism to spec is no easy task. Genetics still isn’t well understood, although it can be said that scientists are unravelling the mysteries of genes at a staggering rate, there’s no universal catalog listing of genes that details what they all do. And biology is messy. Even if researchers know what a particular gene does in an orange tree, for example, when they add it to a yeast cell, it might interact with the native DNA in unexpected ways. If they’re adding several genes from different species to that yeast cell, things get even more complicated.

That’s why Ginkgo takes an engineering approach to biology, hewing to a rigorous design-build-test cycle. In this case, they’re designing, building, and testing living organisms.

The new lab’s extreme automation is critical to this approach, says Patrick Boyle, Ginkgo’s head of organism design.

“In grad school, I might have taken my five best ideas and tried them out,” Boyle says, "here we take our 1,000 best ideas, try them all out, and see which works best.”

So how does that design, build, and test cycle work in practice? Take Ginkgo’s first efforts in the perfume business as an example. Ginkgo is working with the French perfumier Robertet on a yeast that spits out rose oil. There’s a business case for making this microbe. Extracting traditional rose oil from rose petals is expensive, and high end perfumiers look down on chemical substitutes. But adding the right genes from a rose plant to a yeast cell could make it produce the real oil, just in an untraditional way.

The Design process

A yeast serves as the biological “chassis,” the base for the customized creature. Ginkgo designers then search the scientific literature, looking for genes that would cause a cell to produce useful enzymes. They’re looking for enzymes that can work within the yeast cell’s metabolic process; when they feed sugar to the yeast it should carry out chemical reactions that ultimately result in rose oil.

They hunt for genes all across the biological kingdoms.

“We ask, ‘How have different biological niches solved this biochemistry problem, and how can we adapt them to our purposes?’” says Boyle. They can combine genes from different organisms into metabolic pathways, but this requires scaled-up science.

“If you have 100 possible enzymes that can serve as a step in a four-step pathway, that’s a lot of design space to explore,” Boyle says.

The Build process

Ginkgo outsources the actual manufacturing of synthetic DNA, ordering up batches from companies like Twist Bioscience and Gen9. Boyle says the company will receive 700 million base-pairs of synthetic DNA in the next year and a half, which represents half the world’s current market for synthetic DNA. A company like Ginkgo can only exist because the cost of manufacturing DNA has recently come down dramatically - from over $10 million per gene in 2005 to under $10,000 today.

When a batch of manufactured DNA arrives at Ginkgo, liquid handling robots add the various snippets to yeast cells and let the cells grow and multiply. Creative director Agapakis says these robots are getting better and better.

“During my PhD, I spent a lot of time moving tiny amounts of fluid around,” she says, “when we started Ginkgo, a lot of the robots looked like eight-armed grad students - there were a lot of pipettes.”