6 ms·

Ginkgo Bioworks (YC S14) Takes on Zymergen with $45M in Series B Funding

51 points by katm 11y ago

jrkelly 11y ago
I'm Jason Kelly, one of the Ginkgo co-founders -- happy to answer questions!
- roymurdock 11y ago
  Hi Jason, can I ask what a "designer organism" is? Is this just a more marketing-friendly term for a GMO?
  - jrkelly 11y ago
    Sure. To the general public GMO has become synonymous with genetically engineered food crops. At Ginkgo we genetically engineer microbes (brewer's yeast mostly) not plants. We also wanted to highlight that designers at Ginkgo spend time designing the microbes to specification for customers. So we went with designer organism as the term.
    - roymurdock 11y ago
      Thanks for the clear answer. Hopefully biotech communications with the general public will become easier to parse once people stop seeing genetic modification as some kind of dirty, unhealthy, dark magic. Congrats on the successful round!
    - xkcd-sucks 11y ago
      How does pricing work? I imagine you can estimate the difficulty of a metabolic engineering task up front, but it obviously has a tendency towards unexpected difficulties. Do customers ask for a very well defined phenotype ("makes >1g/l/hr paclitaxel", "expresses gfp in >1ppm arsenate across a wide range of ph, osmolarity") or do they ask for more well defined things like stable lines expressing some gene?
- alexjray 11y ago
  Congratulations Jason, you have an awesome company!
- stillsut 11y ago
  A lot of press is singling out CRISPR as the game changer for Bio industry as a whole. Is it particularly useful at Ginkgo, and how is it being used / what problem is it solving?
  - jrkelly 11y ago
    CRISPR makes it easier to edit genomes in a targeted fashion especially in organisms where engineering the genome has traditionally been really hard (plants, mammalian cells). We work in microbes that are a lot easier to engineer out of the gate so it's a little less of a game-changer for us. Still it is amazing technology -- I'm sure we'll make use of it along with most everyone that does biological engineering in the future. Though the synthetic biology crowd is currently poking fun at Wired's over-hyped CRISPR issue, check out #CRISPRfacts
- stillsut 11y ago
  Where are the biggest needs for software in synthetic biology today? What type of software do you predict will have the biggest impact in 10 years?
  - overclocked 11y ago
    Hi, I am Benjie, and I work on software at Ginkgo. Synthetic biology is a big field; Ginkgo applies synthetic biology to metabolic engineering and we develop software that are somewhat specific to that area. For example, many people talk about omics data by themselves, but we develop and use tools that allow us to integrate genetic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data with genetic changes, strain culturing conditions, sample prep parameters, and instrument settings. We want the truth. In 10 years, the biggest impact left by our software efforts will not be any single piece of software, but a set of forward engineering rules, gathered by our existing and future software, that enables true design automation and makes biology a great engineering platform.
- throw9823745 11y ago
  I've heard around the Boston scene that you guys have started firing or are about to fire a number of your employees as part of this funding round. Any truth or just mistaken rumors?
  - jrkelly 11y ago
    That sounds like an insane thing to do? Have no idea where that is from.
    - throw9823745 11y ago
      Glad to hear the rumors are false. Congrats on the raise!
- osazuwa 11y ago
  I'm a statistical machine learning specialist who uses graphical models to model signaling and metabolic pathways from 'omics data. Some of it has involved writing domain specific languages for representing biological pathways, and I have seen other people who do that talk to the synthetic biology community. All my PhD research has focused on medical science, but I am hoping after finishing to move from a systems biology focus to a synthetic biology focus, as in designing artificial pathways and engineering them in experiments rather than designing experiments for reverse engineering natural pathways. Does that resonate with your work at Ginkgo? Or does my skill-set have no relevance to synth bio?
dluan 11y ago
Congrats to all of the brilliant folks at Gingko! Hurry up and automate science!
krmboya 11y ago
Felt the name sounded familiar and realized that I'd previously read that Tom Knight (of the Lisp Machine fame) is also one of the co-founders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Knight_%28scientist%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Knight_%28scientist%29

51 points by katm 11y ago

jrkelly 11y ago

I'm Jason Kelly, one of the Ginkgo co-founders -- happy to answer questions!

roymurdock 11y ago
Hi Jason, can I ask what a "designer organism" is? Is this just a more marketing-friendly term for a GMO?
- jrkelly 11y ago
  Sure. To the general public GMO has become synonymous with genetically engineered food crops. At Ginkgo we genetically engineer microbes (brewer's yeast mostly) not plants. We also wanted to highlight that designers at Ginkgo spend time designing the microbes to specification for customers. So we went with designer organism as the term.
  - roymurdock 11y ago
    Thanks for the clear answer. Hopefully biotech communications with the general public will become easier to parse once people stop seeing genetic modification as some kind of dirty, unhealthy, dark magic. Congrats on the successful round!
  - xkcd-sucks 11y ago
    How does pricing work? I imagine you can estimate the difficulty of a metabolic engineering task up front, but it obviously has a tendency towards unexpected difficulties. Do customers ask for a very well defined phenotype ("makes >1g/l/hr paclitaxel", "expresses gfp in >1ppm arsenate across a wide range of ph, osmolarity") or do they ask for more well defined things like stable lines expressing some gene?
alexjray 11y ago
Congratulations Jason, you have an awesome company!
stillsut 11y ago
A lot of press is singling out CRISPR as the game changer for Bio industry as a whole. Is it particularly useful at Ginkgo, and how is it being used / what problem is it solving?
- jrkelly 11y ago
  CRISPR makes it easier to edit genomes in a targeted fashion especially in organisms where engineering the genome has traditionally been really hard (plants, mammalian cells). We work in microbes that are a lot easier to engineer out of the gate so it's a little less of a game-changer for us. Still it is amazing technology -- I'm sure we'll make use of it along with most everyone that does biological engineering in the future. Though the synthetic biology crowd is currently poking fun at Wired's over-hyped CRISPR issue, check out #CRISPRfacts
stillsut 11y ago
Where are the biggest needs for software in synthetic biology today? What type of software do you predict will have the biggest impact in 10 years?
- overclocked 11y ago
  Hi, I am Benjie, and I work on software at Ginkgo. Synthetic biology is a big field; Ginkgo applies synthetic biology to metabolic engineering and we develop software that are somewhat specific to that area. For example, many people talk about omics data by themselves, but we develop and use tools that allow us to integrate genetic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data with genetic changes, strain culturing conditions, sample prep parameters, and instrument settings. We want the truth. In 10 years, the biggest impact left by our software efforts will not be any single piece of software, but a set of forward engineering rules, gathered by our existing and future software, that enables true design automation and makes biology a great engineering platform.
throw9823745 11y ago
I've heard around the Boston scene that you guys have started firing or are about to fire a number of your employees as part of this funding round. Any truth or just mistaken rumors?
- jrkelly 11y ago
  That sounds like an insane thing to do? Have no idea where that is from.
  - throw9823745 11y ago
    Glad to hear the rumors are false. Congrats on the raise!
osazuwa 11y ago
I'm a statistical machine learning specialist who uses graphical models to model signaling and metabolic pathways from 'omics data. Some of it has involved writing domain specific languages for representing biological pathways, and I have seen other people who do that talk to the synthetic biology community. All my PhD research has focused on medical science, but I am hoping after finishing to move from a systems biology focus to a synthetic biology focus, as in designing artificial pathways and engineering them in experiments rather than designing experiments for reverse engineering natural pathways. Does that resonate with your work at Ginkgo? Or does my skill-set have no relevance to synth bio?

dluan 11y ago

Congrats to all of the brilliant folks at Gingko! Hurry up and automate science!

krmboya 11y ago

Felt the name sounded familiar and realized that I'd previously read that Tom Knight (of the Lisp Machine fame) is also one of the co-founders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Knight_%28scientist%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Knight_%28scientist%29