Cambrian Genomics was a biotechnology company based in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

which used a laser-based technique to synthesize DNA. Cambrian Genomics produced genetic material for a 2013 effort to produce

genetically modified Genetic engineering, also called genetic modification or genetic manipulation, is the modification and manipulation of an organism's genes using technology. It is a set of Genetic engineering techniques, technologies used to change the gene ...

glowing plants for sale to the public. A

Kickstarter Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...

campaign raised $500,000 for the Glowing Plant project. Cambrian Genomics maintained that it could make any life form by laser printing DNA. It was able to print DNA for companies such as Roche,

GlaxoSmithKline GSK plc, formerly GlaxoSmithKline plc, is a British multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company with global headquarters in London, England. Established in 2000 by a merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham. GSK is the ten ...

, and

Thermo Fisher Scientific Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is an American supplier of scientific instrumentation, reagents and consumables, and software services. Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, Thermo Fisher was formed through the merger of Thermo Electron and Fisher S ...

. The company received investments from investors such as

Peter Thiel Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Fac ...

Bre Pettis Bre Pettis (born 1972/1973) is an American entrepreneur, video blogger and creative artist. Pettis is best known as the co-founder and former CEO of MakerBot Industries, a 3D printer company now owned by Stratasys. Early life and education Pe ...

from

Makerbot MakerBot Industries, LLC is an American desktop 3D printer manufacturer company headquartered in New York City. It was founded in January 2009 by Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer, and Zach "Hoeken" Smith to build on the early progress of the RepRap Proje ...

, Bryan Johnson from Braintree,

Jeff Hammerbacher Jeff Hammerbacher is a data scientist. He was chief scientist and cofounder at Cloudera and later served on the faculty of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Early life Hammerbacher grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His father worked at th ...

from

Cloudera Cloudera, Inc. is an American software company providing enterprise data management systems that make significant use of Apache Hadoop. As of January 31, 2021, the company had approximately 1,800 customers. History Cloudera, Inc. was formed on J ...

Carl Bass Carl Bass is a former president and chief executive officer of Autodesk, Inc., a maker of professional 3D design software and consumer applications, and was a co-founder of Ithaca Software, which commercialized HOOPS, a 3D graphics system. Bass h ...

and Jeff Kowalski of

Autodesk Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that makes software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquartered ...

, Dave Friedberg from Climate Corporation, and VC firms. It later promoted that its customers can design new creatures by modifying the genetic codes of plants and animals using a computer. In 2014, Cambrian Genomics raised a $10 million round of funding intended for printing DNA for customers in the industrial chemical and agricultural industries. The company's founder, Austen Heinz, committed suicide at the age of 31 on May 24, 2015. The company encountered difficulties getting plants to emit significant amounts of light, and announced via email in December 2017 that it had exhausted other money-earning bioluminescence ideas and was ceasing operations. Cambrian Genomics used commercially available genome sequencers, as well as a sequencer built by Heinz. The sequencer allowed them to recover the underlying DNA rather than destroying it in the sequencing process. The company then used laser-pulse catapulting to eject copies of DNA. Clients could use

polymerase chain reaction The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a method widely used to rapidly make millions to billions of copies (complete or partial) of a specific DNA sample, allowing scientists to take a very small sample of DNA and amplify it (or a part of it) t ...

to copy that new synthetic DNA and insert it into cells.

References

Biotechnology companies of the United States Biotechnology companies established in 2011 2011 establishments in California {{Company-stub