(725g) Taking Any Molecule from Any Microbe from the Lab to Full-Scale Manufacturing

Identifying, understanding, and ultimately engineering the complex set of interacting genes responsible for any cellular phenotype is extremely difficult and traditionally requires years of study. For example, optimizing metabolic flux to a native or non-native small molecule or increasing the diversity of carbon sources that a microbe can use are well-studied topics, and yet very few novel compounds have made it through the high risk path to commercialization. To address this problem, Zymergen has developed a powerful platform for automated high-throughput microbial strain development that is focused on improving the economics of large-scale fermentation processes and accelerating the industrialization of novel bio-products. The platform has been designed to be flexible, highly reliable, and host-agnostic. With its high throughput capability Zymergen tests thousands of design ideas across many library types to identify those that improve performance. Automation makes Zymergen’s strain improvement process both precise and repeatable. Using this platform, Zymergen takes a data-driven approach to biology, capturing as much data as possible and using heuristically-guided search processes that embrace the complexity of biology.