Gen9 to Supply Ginkgo Bioworks with 300 Million Base Pairs of Synthetic DNA

Gen9 announced an agreement with Ginkgo Bioworks for the manufacture and supply of 300 million base pairs of long-length synthetic DNA content.  The customized DNA is the critical raw material for Ginkgo’s biological prototypes for products engineered through synthetic biology. This groundbreaking partnership between two synthetic biology powerhouses will leverage Gen9’s unique industrial capabilities in building pathway-length DNA at an unparalleled scale. Ginkgo will use the DNA to more rapidly generate genetic designs for testing in its organism engineering foundry for applications in the chemicals, industrial enzymes and therapeutics markets. 

“Long pieces of DNA are essential to metabolic engineering, and Gen9 is the best in the world at building large constructs. We’re delighted to work with Gen9 on this unprecedented order of pathway-length DNA synthesis," said Jason Kelly, CEO and Co-Founder of Ginkgo Bioworks.

The DNA will be built on Gen9’s BioFab® DNA construction platform. Comprising multiple proprietary technologies from rapid design and optimization of thousands of DNA sequences, to chip-based oligo synthesis, to multiplex DNA assembly, the platform enables construction of gene to pathway length DNA at an unrivalled scale. Gen9’s technology makes traditional manual DNA cloning and low-throughput synthesis methods obsolete, enabling more aggressive scientific approaches focused on parallel design and testing.

Added Jason Kelly, "With these orders, Ginkgo is able to move towards outsourcing essentially all of our in vitro DNA construction to the DNA synthesis industry. If your company is still cloning by hand you’re missing out on a big opportunity."

“Our industrial manufacturing process delivers enormous capacity for sequence-perfect, long-length DNA content, and we are thrilled that Ginkgo is utilizing our unique capabilities as a key driver to accelerate their organism engineering at a level never before seen in the industry,” said Kevin Munnelly, President and CEO of Gen9. “Engineering with biology is driving innovations that will solve some of the biggest challenges we face in the world today. As market demand for large enzyme, pathway, and organism engineering projects grows at a dramatic pace, Gen9 will provide the DNA to fuel those projects.”

Earlier this year, Gen9 launched its MAP (Multiplex Access Partnership) program for customers to leverage the BioFab® platform for megabase quantities of synthetic DNA at preferred pricing.