Jay D. Keasling is a professor[ambiguous] of chemical engineering and bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Keasling’s laboratory has developed or adopted many of the latest analytical tools to troubleshoot our genetic manipulations.

Keasling's laboratory has applied metabolic chemistry to a number of real-world problems including the production of the antimalarial drug artemisinin and drop-in biofuels.

Artemisinin, a sesquiterpene lactone endoperoxide, extracted from Artemisia annua L is highly effective against Plasmodium spp.

[7] The microorganisms were engineered with a ten-enzyme biosynthetic pathway using genes from Artemisia annua, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and Escherichia coli (twelve genes in all) to transform a simple and renewable sugar, like glucose, into the complicated chemical structure of the anti-malarial drug artemisinin.

[8] A critical element of Keasling's work was the development of genetic tools to aid in the manipulation of microbial metabolism, particularly for low-value products that require high yields from sugar.His laboratory developed single-copy plasmids for the expression of complex metabolic pathways, promoter systems that allow regulated control of transcription consistently in all cells of a culture, mRNA stabilization technologies to regulate the stability of mRNA segments,[9] and a protein engineering approach to attach several enzymes of a metabolic pathway onto a synthetic protein scaffold to increase pathway flux.

Another critical aspect of Keasling's work was discovering the chemistry and enzymes in Artemisia annua responsible for synthesis of artemisinin.

First, microbial synthesis will reduce the cost of artemisinin, the most expensive component of artemisinin-based combination therapies—by as much as tenfold—and therefore make artemisinin-derived anti-malarial drugs more affordable to people in the developing world.

To ensure that the process he developed would benefit people in the developing world, Keasling assembled a unique team consisting of his laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, Amyris Biotechnologies ( a company founded on this technology) and the Institute for OneWorld Health (a non-profit pharmaceutical company located in San Francisco).

The team was funded in December 2004 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop the microbial production process.

It is anticipated that 100-150 million treatments will be produced using this technology and shipped annually to Africa, Asia and South America.

Keasling’s laboratory has engineered microorganisms to produce hydrocarbons with similar properties to the fuels now derived from petroleum.

Cellulose, a potentially low-cost starting material, must be depolymerized into sugars by adding an expensive cocktail of enzymes.

[23] As a technological platform, biofuel manufacturing faces huge economic hurdles many of which depend on the market pricing of crude oil and other conventionally sourced fuels.

Keasling is a founder of Amyris (with Vincent Martin, Jack Newman, Neil Renninger and Kinkead Reiling), LS9 (now part of REG with George Church and Chris Sommerville), and Lygos (with Leonard Katz, Clem Fortman, Jeffrey Dietrich and Eric Steen).