Once upon a time, perfume was a luxury only kings and queens could afford. The technology of fragrance originally involved crushing up flowers, until the French perfected the technique of extracting and concentrating essential oils from plants instead. Later, chemists came along who could whip up a recipe for a fragrance in a lab, giving us the mass-produced scents that the proletariat know and love.

But, alas, a rose is still a rose.

To this day, no scientists or perfumers have been able to reproduce the complex and subtle scent notes of natural rose oil, which is, after all, the product of millions of years of evolution and hundreds of individual compounds. Many high-end fragrance brands still use natural rose oil in their products, but are increasingly faced with supply shortages, due to crop failures, natural disasters, and war-related instability (1,000 rose buds reportedly go into making the smallest bottle of Chanel No.5).

Cultured rose oil product. Patrick Boyle/Gingko Bioworks

Few know this better the French fragrance maker Robertet. Founded in 1850 in the town of Grasse in the south of France–now, the world’s perfume capital–the company pioneered the process of extracting essential oils from flowers; it manufactures flower oils and other natural products for the global market today.

For Robertet, it would a major breakthrough if it didn’t have to rely on farmed flowers. And so the company has teamed up with a synthetic biology startup, called Gingko Bioworks, to genetically engineer baker’s yeast to do all the dirty work.

“We’re calling this project the cultured rose,” says Patrick Boyle, an organism designer at the Boston company, who notes that microbes produce many naturally fermented product, such as beer, cheese, and yogurt, that we consume today. “What we’re doing is taking genes from roses and other flowers, transferring them into yeast, and rebuilding the bio-synthetic pathways that are producing the fragrances that roses produce.”

© Micah Rich

Ginkgo has already produced several prototype strains of yeast to share with the company’s perfumers. And by working with designer yeast, Robertet can now customize its own rose fragrances by mixing and matching genes from different rose types in the lab, generating entirely new scents. It’s a creative process, Boyle says, and the perfume experts will guide its direction.