Joyn Bio

Joyn Bio is an agricultural biotechnology company founded in 2017 as a joint venture between Ginkgo Bioworks and Bayer to engineer nitrogen-fixing microbes for cereal crops. The company uses synthetic biology tools from Ginkgo's platform to design and optimize bacteria that establish stable associations with corn, wheat, and other grass crops, fixing atmospheric nitrogen in a way that legumes achieve naturally but grasses do not. Eliminating or dramatically reducing synthetic nitrogen fertilizer in cereal crops would represent one of the most significant advances in sustainable agriculture given that nitrogen fertilizer production consumes roughly 1% of global energy and contributes substantially to greenhouse gas emissions through both manufacturing and field application. Joyn Bio is conducting field trials to demonstrate nitrogen fixation performance in cereal crops at commercially relevant scales. The company leverages Bayer's global agricultural distribution and Ginkgo's synthetic biology platform to pursue an ambitious program that, if successful, could reshape the economics and environmental footprint of global grain production.