In Massachusetts, Ginkgo Bioworks and Prospect Bio are accelerating biological strain development. Prospect will develop a number of biosensors for Ginkgo products and the biosensors will be deployed to speed up the discovery process by decreasing the time and cost of screening prototype biological designs.
Currently, analytical screening of engineered microbial strains is a recognized bottleneck in the organism engineering design cycle. While traditional analytical chemistry techniques require that one strain be measured at a time, biosensors can measure many strains in parallel, thereby bringing costs down nearly 40 times lower. In this way, biosensors enable screening of vastly larger libraries of engineered microbes, accelerating time to commercialization.
Biosensors have recently made significant impacts in commercial scale research, at Prospect and beyond. Elsewhere, researchers have recently relied solely on a biosensor to discover a novel small-molecule transport system in bacteria. By complementing Ginkgo’s current screening methods, biosensors are expected to enable new growth in biological engineering.