Hacker News Reader

A lot of press is singling out CRISPR as the game changer for Bio industry as a whole.

Is it particularly useful at Ginkgo, and how is it being used / what problem is it solving?

CRISPR makes it easier to edit genomes in a targeted fashion especially in organisms where engineering the genome has traditionally been really hard (plants, mammalian cells). We work in microbes that are a lot easier to engineer out of the gate so it's a little less of a game-changer for us. Still it is amazing technology -- I'm sure we'll make use of it along with most everyone that does biological engineering in the future. Though the synthetic biology crowd is currently poking fun at Wired's over-hyped CRISPR issue, check out #CRISPRfacts

Reply on news.ycombinator.com