Plant-biotechnology company, GreenLab, has announced a new collaboration with Ginkgo Bioworks, a leading platform for cell programming and biosecurity. The partnership aims to develop a product for degrading per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) by utilizing Ginkgo Enzyme Services to discover a novel enzyme crucial for this application.
Ginkgo Enzyme Services specializes in providing comprehensive enzyme discovery and optimization research and development services to companies. With their expertise in this field and the unique requirements of the project, Ginkgo is offering their services under a success-based pricing model to help mitigate research and development risks for GreenLab.
GreenLab has developed a proprietary technology that enables proteins and enzymes to be grown within corn kernels. This innovative approach allows for scalable production across vast cornfields without requiring significant additional upfront investments in capital or infrastructure. Once the desired protein is extracted from the kernel with minimal waste, the majority of the corn can continue along existing value chains for food, feed, or fuel. Currently, GreenLab has successfully commercialized two transformative proteins: manganese peroxidase, a versatile solution for environmental remediation, and brazzein, a high-intensity sweetness provider.
“GreenLab is eager to work with Ginkgo towards solving such a massive and prevalent environmental and health problem,” said Karen Wilson, CEO of GreenLab. “By leveraging Ginkgo Enzyme Services to conduct our enzyme discovery and development, we believe we’re enabling our R&D team to produce, pilot, and deploy our product faster and with less risk than any other option we considered.”
“We are thrilled to be working with GreenLab on PFAS degradation, and are ready to utilize our platform to solve such a challenge,” said Sneha Srikrishnan, Director Business Development and Product Lead, Proteins. “At Ginkgo, we say that our partners can find the needle they’re looking for in our tech stack. We’ll be deploying our powerful AI-enabled in-house computational tools, best-in-class enzyme Codebase, and ultra-high throughput screening methods as we seek to find a novel enzyme fit for GreenLab to address this globally important enzymological problem.”
