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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Jurassic Park for Perfume: Ginkgo Bioworks Reconstructs Scents From Extinct Plants [ieee.org]

Researchers at Ginkgo Bioworks [ginkgobioworks.com], one of the largest synthetic-biology companies in world [ieee.org], succeeded in resurrecting the smell by expressing the genes needed for making the defunct flower's pungent aroma molecules in microbes. Ginkgo unveiled—and demoed—the new perfume at the company's inaugural annual meeting in Boston last week.

[...] They took small snippets of tissue from around a dozen plants, including the Falls-of-the-Ohio scurfpea (last seen in 1881), the Wynberg conebush (last seen in 1806), and the Hawaiian mountain hibiscus (presumed extinct around 1912). They then worked with Beth Shapiro [ucsc.edu], a paleogenomicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to isolate and decode the ancient DNA, before taking a Jurassic Park–like approach to genetic reconstitution.

Back in the company's robot-filled organism-design lab [ieee.org]—which last week expanded for a fourth time to accommodate the engineering of mammalian cells [prnewswire.com]—Ginkgo scientists went through a highly structured trial-and-error design process to synthesize biochemical recipes for making aromatic oils called terpenes.

In total, they fashioned around 2,000 gene variants, each a hybrid of modern plant DNA and centuries-old sequences from the hibiscus, scurfpea, conebush, or other extinct plants. All that genetic material was manufactured in a DNA synthesizer; liquid-handling robots added the gene snippets to yeast cells, and mass-spectrometry machines analyzed the resulting terpene molecules.

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