In January 2018, Radiant Genomics Inc. was acquired by Zymergen, a firm that integrates automation, machine learning, and genomics to rapidly accelerate the pace of scientific advancement. Now operating as a subsiduary of Zymergen, Radiant is developing a synthetic biology platform that provides industrially scalable access to the chemistry encoded by natural organisms. The firm is especially focused on soil metagenomics: the study of microorganisms that inhabit soil. Targeted end-markets include but are not limited to, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and speciality chemicals. The firm had been attempting to take advantage of the advances in DNA sequencing and high performance computing to enable replacing the costly, risk-filled steps in natural product discovery with highly parallel, commodity technologies that were pioneered by the semiconductor industry. In 2015 Radiant Genomics had entered a collaboration agreement with Dow AgroSciences for the discovery of novel crop protection systems
