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The article describes how Jay Keasling, a synthetic chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his team have engineered yeast cells to produce an important precursor for a drug to treat malaria. Keasling collaborated with Amyris Biotechnologies and non-profit drug company Institute for OneWorld Health to try to complete the synthesis of artemisinin. The research was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The article offers information on the study conducted by Jay Keasling of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, and his colleagues, in which they designed an Escherichia coli bacterium that would produce four enzymes that digest cellulose and hemicelluloses in switchgrass.