(451b) Many Microbes, Many Molecules; Using Automation and Big Data to Create Better Bugs for Industrial Fermentation

Zymergen has built an automated, high throughput strain engineering platform that is flexible enough to work with diverse micro-organisms, including those used at scale in the largest fermented products markets. Throughput allows us to test thousands of design ideas across many library types to find the ideas that improve performance. Automation makes our strain improvement process precise and repeatable, which means we can identify ideas that increase performance by only a few percent and find the next set of good ideas in the same time it took to find the first. As we reliably build and test design ideas across diverse microbes and pathways, we create a rich data set that we use to refine our approach. This data informs not only the library types we use to solve a specific problem, but also the protocol and process improvements that will have maximal benefit.