Expanding the Portfolio of Bio-Manufacturing: Advanced Automation, Biology, and Computational Tools for Rapid Microbe Engineering

Amyris is an end-to-end biological manufacturer that uses synthetic biology to engineer microbes as catalysts for conversion of sugar into chemical products. Many of these chemical targets were previously derived from limited natural resources and economically inaccessible via traditional chemistries. In the last decade, Amyris has developed a sophisticated technology platform for engineering microbes to produce high levels of isoprenoids including artemisinin and farnesene. In recent years, we have begun to harness the power of this proven infrastructure to expand the portfolio of bio-manufactured chemical products.

In this talk, I will describe the current state-of-the-art tools at Amyris, including our automated strain engineering, high-throughput screening, and fermentation. Then I will discuss how these tools are evolving under the DARPA-funded “Mgs to Kgs” project to enable the concurrent development of 100’s of products simultaneously. In the first year, the project has produced more than 150 target molecules from all parts of metabolic space. As the project continues, “Mgs to Kgs” will enable Amyris to incorporate next generation high-throughput ‘omics, automation, data science, and machine learning tools to further increase the rate at which biology can be engineered.