Under the guidance of its founder Jay Keasling, it has been working on a type of isoprenoid (a class of chemicals that include rubber).

ECONOMIST: Advanced biofuels

Both Endy and UC, Berkeley's Keasling say that unless basic components are made freely available it will be too expensive to make anything useful or complex.

FORBES: Drew Endy aims to reinvent the biotechnology industry.

Synthetic biology is such a small field right now that Keasling and Somerville were both initially involved with LS9, but left, leaving Harvard researcher George Church as the main scientific founder.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Dr Keasling and his colleagues scour the world for suitable enzymes, tweak them to make them work better, then sew the genes for the tweaked enzymes into a bacterium that thus turns out the desired product.

ECONOMIST: Advanced biofuels