Ginkgo Bioworks: The Digest’s 2015 8-Slide Guide

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July 27, 2015

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by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) Who are they? “Nature’s biodiversity holds answers to challenges in health, energy, food, materials, and more,” they say. “Organism Engineers at Ginkgo learn from Nature to develop new organisms that replace technology with biology.”

… “if successful, Ginkgo Bioworks would create a liquid transportation fuel that is cost competitive with traditional gasoline-based fuels and 10 times more efficient than existing biofuels.”

The project was pretty far out. In it, Ginkgo Bioworks was bypassing photosynthesis and engineering E. coli to directly use carbon dioxide (CO2) to produce biofuels. E. coli doesn’t naturally metabolize CO2, but Ginkgo Bioworks is manipulating and incorporating the genes responsible for CO2 metabolism into the microorganism. By genetically modifying E. coli, Ginkgo Bioworks will enhance its rate of CO2 consumption and liquid fuel production. Ginkgo Bioworks is delivering CO2 to E. coli as formic acid, a simple industrial chemical that provides energy and CO2 to the bacterial system. The project ultimately was cancelled by ARPA-E but Ginkgo remained on screen as it unfolded a number of intriguing developments in other fields. READ MORE and MORE (Biofuels Digest)

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