New lab, greenhouse and research site to be located in Bayer’s Woodland, California, location
Joyn Bio, an ag-biotech company that engineers microbes for sustainable agriculture, has a new home for its plant sciences team, now sharing Bayer’s Vegetable Seed Facility in Woodland, California. Joyn Bio is an independent company that arose out of a partnership with Bayer and Ginkgo Bioworks.
In just 18 months, Joyn’s R&D team in Boston developed microbial leads that are ready to move into greenhouse and micro plot testing. Engineered to reduce the amount of traditional chemical fertilizer required to meet the growing demand for crops like corn, wheat, and rice, Joyn’s microbes enable plants to partially fulfill their nitrogen needs, offering growers a reliable and sustainable alternative. The new site in Woodland is intended to accelerate the research being done, as it offers the resources, capacity, and scale needed to evaluate microbe performance in commercial crop plants.
“The agriculture industry is long overdue for innovation that offers growers high-performing, affordable and sustainable microbial solutions. Opening the doors to a new space dedicated entirely to research and testing is a milestone in our journey toward offering farmers alternatives that address some of their biggest challenges,” said Dr. Mike Miille, CEO of Joyn Bio. “We have made immense strides in microbe development since our founding less than two years ago and more advanced testing is the next step in making our mission a reality. We look forward to joining the Woodland community and continuing our efforts to leverage synthetic biology for more sustainable agriculture practices.”
The new facility — with 12,500 square-feet of lab, office and greenhouse space — is a significant expansion from Joyn’s current tenancy in the Bayer CoLaborator in West Sacramento. The Woodland location complements Joyn’s existing operations at Ginkgo Bioworks in Boston, where Joyn uses the Ginkgo foundries for biological engineering to develop nitrogen-fixing bacteria based on Bayer’s library of more than 100,000 proprietary microbial strains. Between Northern California and Boston, Joyn is now better equipped to leverage the unique resources of its two parent companies, Bayer and Ginkgo, respectively.
