There is currently no known commercial process for degrading the forever chemicals PFAS, short for “per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances”, but GreenLab is on a mission to change that.
GreenLab is a plant-biotechnology company producing complex proteins in corn. It has partnered with Ginkgo Bioworks, which is building a platform for cell programming and biosecurity. Together the two companies are hoping to identify and commercialize an enzyme that can degrade PFAS.
Ginkgo will lead an metagenomic discovery campaign using its metagenomic database to identify a library of PFAS-degrading enzymes. Ginkgo will then identify unique enzymes with the desired activity and transfer the best candidates to GreenLab. In later stages of this collaboration, Ginkgo will use AI-enabled enzyme engineering to further improve on the discovered enzyme.
GreenLab’s technology allows it to grow enzymes and other proteins inside a corn kernel. By producing proteins in a cultivated crop, GreenLab can readily scale up production across acres of cornfields, with little additional up-front capital and infrastructure.
After the protein of interest is extracted from the kernel, most of the corn used will then proceed along the existing value chain, including food, feed or fuel. GreenLab already has two proteins in commercial production, including manganese peroxidase (a multipurpose environmental remediation solution) and brazzein (which delivers a high-intensity sweetness).
“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.”
Another partner, Allonia, plans to work with Ginkgo and GreenLab to help discover a novel enzyme to combat PFAS, and will work with GreenLab as a commercial partner deploying the enzyme in their end-to-end PFAS solution.
“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,” said Gingko’s director of busoness development and product lead, Sneha Srikrishnan.
