With oil flirting around with $140/barrel, this headline stood out while skimming the news today. Looks like a company out in the Valley funded by Vinod Khosla (LS9) has genetically engineered E. coli bacteria to excrete crude oil. They allude to using “synthetic biology” techniques, however it isn’t exactly clear how or what they are doing. Will be interesting to see how they “package” the bugs so they don’t run into the same problems that Monsanto had with their GM seeds (farmers were replanting harvested seeds without paying a license fee to the company.) 

There were headlines a few months ago out of Craig Ventner’s lab, which had produced the first fully synthetic organism. Those headlines actually led to a project I did with a few colleagues looking at the market implications of Synthetic Biology.

TMO Analysis-Synthetic Biology