Engineered and Selected Microbes for Ag Biologicals
Don't tell the microbes that I said this, but plants might be my favorite organisms. Today we're talking about using microbes for applications in agriculture: ag biologicals.
Transcript
Agriculture was the first gen biotech. Like the very first gen. It's also part of the next gen. What's changed in recent years is that our tools in systems and synthetic biology are finally a match for the complex challenges of real field agriculture.
Somebody who saw these challenges clearly was Norman Borlaug, aka the father of the Green Revolution, aka the greatest agronomist of all time. In 1997, he said "unless there is one master gene for yield, which I'm guessing there is not, engineering for yield will be very complex."1
He was right. There is no master gene for yield. So to get the job done, we need biotech with functionality across the whole growth cycle. We need ag biologicals that support the plant in many ways, including some that don't require targeted gene modification.
Here at Ginkgo Bioworks we're a biotech R&D partner. That means we're not making our own ag products, we work with you in the ag business to build out your portfolios. We handle the DNA stuff, using engineering or selection to create organisms for your application. When the organism is a microbe and the application is agriculture, the result is an ag biological.
What kinds of ag biologicals might be out there? Microbes have been co-evolving with plants since the beginning of time, so they've come up with any number of mutually beneficial interactions that we can enhance with biotechnology. We can categorize ag biologicals in a few different ways.
We can divide them up by function.
Biocontrols are there to protect crops from pests.
Biostimulants encourage growth or other beneficial processes in the plant.
Biofertilizers supply nutrients or make nutrients more available.
We can organize them by format.
Live microbes that are going to be metabolically active out in the field.
Microbial bioproducts derived from fermentation and deployed like a chemical product would be.
Or we can think about their formulation. This includes everything it takes to get the active ingredient working out in the field.
This could mean a seed coating,
a liquid formulation for soil drenching
or a foliar spray that goes directly on the plant
From Ginkgo's perspective, these are all microbes that can be engineered, evolved or selected. So they're all within scope for the biology foundry that we've built. But with so many possibilities, it can be hard to get a handle on where the real opportunities are. Where does your R&D project begin?
One place you could start is with Ginkgo's microbial strain library. In 2022, we acquired more than 200,000 microbial strains suitable for ag biological R&D and we've characterized some of them to identify promising candidates for starting your project. We call them product headstarts.
I'll give just a few examples.
We have candidate strains for nitrogen fixation, including for cereal crops or legumes.
We have microbes that could solubilize phosphate, including spore-forming microbes that tend to be shelf-stable and easier to deploy.
Plant growth regulators, including strains that might produce phytohormones or encourage stress tolerance.
Strains that could make bionematicides, biofungicides, bioinsecticides. All the 'cides.
These are headstart strains, not final products. The idea is that we work with you to find a candidate strain, then together we develop an R&D program for your application that benefits from our tech infrastructure.
In some cases, that program will include genetic engineering. Say, for example, you wanted a strain to make a particular growth regulator. We could do a program to engineer a strain that produces the molecule at higher titer.
Or, in other cases, you may want to improve the strain without targeted genetic modification for regulatory or whatever reasons. Maybe this is a biofungicide microbe that you want to deploy live in the field. We have proprietary technologies that can optimize without engineering.
EncapS is our platform for Encapsulation and Screening in ultra-high throughput. It can sort through 100,000 natural mutants to find the most productive ones. Or we have tech for Adaptive Laboratory Evolution. If you want a strain that grows on a particular feedstock or a particular environment like high salt, low pH, we can get you there with the power of natural selection.
Once you've got your microbe or your microbial product, you're still only halfway done. We've got a fermentation team that can help scale up your commercial process. We've got a formulation team that can help to purify your active and package it as a liquid suspension, as a dry formulation or as a seed coating. We have field testing facilities for both row crops and specialty crops. Our data science team can collect digital phenotyping data to validate the in-field performance.
At Ginkgo, we're good at the DNA stuff and bringing microbes with that next gen functionality. But we also know that these products that you make with us are taking on the complex challenges of real field ag. So the microbial engineering has to meet the fermentation, the formulation and the field to get the best chance to develop something that can effectively deploy.