Ginkgo Bioworks and Acies Bio Partner to Advance Fungal Protein Production Using Aspergillus niger
- Gauri Khanna
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
Ginkgo Bioworks and Acies Bio have announced a collaboration to develop optimised microbial strains of Aspergillus niger for use in industrial protein production.
The partnership will use Ginkgo's cell programming platform to engineer fungal strains with improved fermentation performance, drawing on Acies Bio's expertise in filamentous fungi.
The deal signals growing commercial interest in filamentous fungi as a scalable, lower-footprint alternative to conventional animal and plant proteins.
A Fungus Already Embedded in Industry
Aspergillus niger is not a newcomer to food and industrial biotechnology. The filamentous fungus, so named for the thread-like structure of its growing network, is already widely used to produce citric acid, enzymes, and various food-grade compounds. Its regulatory history and established fermentation profile make it an attractive chassis for next-generation protein production, which is likely why both Ginkgo Bioworks and Acies Bio have chosen it as the focal organism for their new partnership.
The collaboration pairs Ginkgo's cell programming platform, a high-throughput infrastructure for designing, building, and testing engineered microorganisms, with Acies Bio's specialised knowledge of filamentous fungi biology. Acies Bio, a Slovenian biotechnology company, has developed deep technical competency in working with Aspergillus species, including strain optimisation and fermentation scale-up.
What the Partnership Involves
Under the agreement, the two companies will work to engineer Aspergillus niger strains with enhanced performance characteristics suited to industrial protein fermentation. The goal is to improve traits such as yield, fermentation efficiency, and product consistency: the core metrics that determine whether a microbial protein process can compete economically at scale.
Ginkgo's platform contributes automation and data infrastructure that can accelerate the iterative process of strain development. Rather than making incremental improvements through conventional microbiology, the platform enables a higher volume of design-build-test cycles, compressing timelines for arriving at production-ready strains.
The partnership is structured around Ginkgo providing its foundry capabilities while Acies Bio brings domain expertise in the target organism. This kind of division of labour, a platform company combining with a specialist organism developer, has become a recurring model in the fermentation protein sector, where the bottleneck is often not the organism itself but the speed at which it can be optimised for industrial conditions.
Ginkgo Bioworks has faced well-documented financial headwinds in recent years, and the company has been actively repositioning towards asset-light partnerships and licensing arrangements rather than internal product development. This collaboration with Acies Bio fits that strategic pattern.
Why Filamentous Fungi and Why Now
Interest in filamentous fungi as a protein production chassis has grown considerably, driven by their ability to produce high-protein biomass with fibre-like texture: a property that is difficult to replicate with bacterial or yeast fermentation. Companies such as Quorn, which uses Fusarium venenatum to produce its mycoprotein, have demonstrated that fungal fermentation can support mainstream consumer food products at scale.
Aspergillus niger offers a different profile: it has a long history of safe use, a broad enzymatic repertoire, and established regulatory recognition in multiple jurisdictions. For companies seeking to build protein ingredients rather than finished consumer products, it represents a pragmatic starting point.
The mycoprotein sector more broadly is navigating a more cautious investment environment, with capital allocation tightening across alternative proteins. Against that backdrop, partnerships that reduce individual capital exposure while sharing technical risk may become more common. A collaboration between a platform provider and an organism specialist, focused on ingredient-level outputs rather than consumer brands, reflects a more measured commercial posture for the sector.
Limitations and What Comes Next
The announcement does not specify timelines for strain delivery, commercial milestones, or target markets for the resulting protein ingredients. It is also not yet clear which end-use applications (human food, animal feed, or industrial enzyme production) are prioritised. The development of optimised strains is a necessary but early step; fermentation scale-up, regulatory review, and customer qualification all follow before any commercial product reaches market.
Whether this particular collaboration yields commercially viable strains will depend on factors the announcement does not address, including the performance gap between current and target strain metrics, and the regulatory pathway each jurisdiction requires for novel or modified Aspergillus niger applications in food.
