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Sure. To the general public GMO has become synonymous with genetically engineered food crops. At Ginkgo we genetically engineer microbes (brewer's yeast mostly) not plants. We also wanted to highlight that designers at Ginkgo spend time designing the microbes to specification for customers. So we went with designer organism as the term.

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How does pricing work? I imagine you can estimate the difficulty of a metabolic engineering task up front, but it obviously has a tendency towards unexpected difficulties. Do customers ask for a very well defined phenotype ("makes >1g/l/hr paclitaxel", "expresses gfp in >1ppm arsenate across a wide range of ph, osmolarity") or do they ask for more well defined things like stable lines expressing some gene?

Thanks for the clear answer. Hopefully biotech communications with the general public will become easier to parse once people stop seeing genetic modification as some kind of dirty, unhealthy, dark magic.

Congrats on the successful round!

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