Synthetic Biology FAQ

Ginkgo Bioworks is the largest dedicated synbio company, operating what it calls a "cell programming platform." Ginkgo designs custom microorganisms for clients across pharmaceuticals, agriculture, food, and industrial chemicals. Its foundry model — high-throughput, automated strain engineering — aims to make biological engineering as scalable and repeatable as software development. The company went public via SPAC in 2021 and has since focused on expanding its platform and customer base.

Synthetic biology is already transforming how medicines are made. One of the field's landmark achievements was the engineering of yeast to produce artemisinic acid, a precursor to the antimalarial drug artemisinin, which had previously been extracted from sweet wormwood plants at great expense. This work, led by Jay Keasling at UC Berkeley and supported by the Gates Foundation, demonstrated that synthetic biology could stabilize the supply of a life-saving drug.

Founded in 2009 by MIT synthetic biologists, Ginkgo Bioworks operates as a "cell programming" platform. Rather than developing its own end products, Ginkgo designs and engineers organisms for partners across industries including pharmaceuticals, agriculture, food, and fragrances. The company operates automated foundries that can design, build, and test thousands of engineered organisms in parallel. Ginkgo went public via SPAC in 2021.

Synthetic biology and gene editing are deeply intertwined but distinct. Gene editing tools like CRISPR are among the most important instruments in the synthetic biologist's toolkit — they enable precise modifications to existing genomes. But synthetic biology goes further, designing entirely new genetic programs that do not exist in nature. Gene editing is a technique; synthetic biology is a design philosophy.

The intellectual roots of synthetic biology stretch back to the early 2000s. In 2000, two foundational papers appeared in Nature: one describing a synthetic genetic toggle switch and another describing a synthetic oscillator (the "repressilator"), both built from standardized genetic parts in E. coli. These demonstrated that biological circuits could be rationally designed, much like electronic circuits.

One of the earliest commercial applications of synthetic biology was engineering microorganisms to produce biofuels and industrial chemicals from renewable feedstocks. Companies have engineered yeast and bacteria to produce artemisinin (an antimalarial drug), farnesene (a precursor to fuels and lubricants), and 1,3-propanediol (used in textiles and plastics), among many other molecules.

Synthetic biology borrows the engineering principle of abstraction hierarchy. At the lowest level are DNA parts (promoters, ribosome binding sites, coding sequences, terminators). These are assembled into devices (genetic circuits that perform a defined function), which in turn are integrated into systems (entire engineered organisms).

Synthetic biology — often shortened to synbio — is the discipline of designing and engineering biological systems to perform functions that do not exist in nature. If traditional biology is about understanding how life works, synthetic biology is about using that understanding to build new things.

Synthetic biology is the discipline of designing and constructing new biological parts, devices, and systems — or redesigning existing ones — for useful purposes. If traditional biology asks "how does life work?", synthetic biology asks "how can we build with life?"

The same capabilities that make synthetic biology powerful also raise serious security questions. The ability to synthesize DNA from scratch, design novel pathogens, or enhance the virulence of existing ones poses dual-use risks that the field takes seriously.