Boston-based Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc. has acquired a "massive microbial strain library" and a "robust product concept pipeline" from AgBiome, an agricultural research firm based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
The assets Ginkgo (NYSE: DNA) acquired from AgBiome will be folded into Ginkgo’s existing AgBio capabilities, which are based in West Sacramento, said Ginkgo spokeswoman Olivia Osborne.
"We are so excited to bring AgBiome's incredible strain and metagenomic collection into Ginkgo,” said Michael Miille, a Ginkgo fellow and senior adviser, in a news release. "This is a world-class asset that will significantly expand our capabilities and can directly benefit Ginkgo's customers in the ag biologicals space."
Before becoming a Ginkgo fellow, Miille was CEO of Joyn Bio, a Woodland-based joint venture founded by Bayer AG and Ginkgo to develop engineered microbes for agriculture. Before that, Miille was head of biologics at Bayer Crop Science, which in 2012 acquired Davis-based AgraQuest, where Miille was an executive, for $425 million.
In October, AgBiome informed the North Carolina Department of Commerce that it planned to lay off all its 123 employees from its operations at its headquarters in North Carolina. The company said it was struggling to find investor money "in an extremely challenging VC and private equity market."
In March, Certis Biologicals of Maryland acquired AgBiome’s lead commercial products, two fungicides called Howler and Theia.
Last week, Ginkgo said it bought the microbial strain library and product concepts pipeline from AgBiome.
The AgBiome "assets will be integrated into Ginkgo Ag Biologicals Services, established with the acquisition of a Bayer agricultural biologicals R&D facility in 2022," Ginkgo said in a news release.
The Bayer agricultural research and development facilities Ginkgo bought in 2022 are the former wet labs and greenhouses of Bayer Crop Science in West Sacramento.
In the 2022 deal, Ginkgo paid $83 million for Bayer’s 175,000-square-foot West Sacramento main building at 890 Embarcadero Drive with its employees. The agreement also bound the companies to work together on new technologies in agriculture. And the deal also got Ginkgo Bayer’s 25,000 square feet of scientific greenhouses in the same office park off Reed Avenue.
Ginkgo said AgBiome “has developed a massive microbial strain library from over 8,000 geographically diverse environmental samples. These isolates have been fully sequenced, producing a rich library with over 500 million unique gene sequences."
The Ginkgo acquisition also includes a dozen product candidates with greenhouse or field validation.
Osborne said the company is not planning to expand facilities or headcount in West Sacramento as a result of the acquisition.
Combining these assets creates "one of the deepest and most advanced ag-biological discovery and development platforms," Ginkgo said.
AgBiome was founded in 2012 to replace petrochemical-based ingredients with naturally derived microbes, genes, proteins and enzymes that perform the same functions.
Over the years, AgBiome was awarded numerous grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for research into food crop plant health, according to its website.
