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“Here. Smell this.”

Effendi Leonard smiles and pushes a vial of pale, cloudy liquid toward me, like a grandfather offering a plate of cookies. I unscrew the cap and take a whiff. The scent is earthy, a bit like rising dough. “It smells like bread,” I tell him.

He beams but doesn’t say anything, then hands me another vial. “And this?”

This one smells sweet, like fruit, but harder to place. I inhale again and guess. “Grape soda?”

We’re standing around a lab table at Ginkgo BioWorks, a Boston biotech company, playing Name That Smell. I was right. The second vial is meant to smell like grapes, though you’d never know that from its contents. There isn’t the slightest trace of grape in it. In fact, designers created it using “a regular baker’s yeast,” says Leonard, an organism designer at Ginkgo.

To make something that smells like grapes without using grapes, designers inserted genes from various plants, including corn, into the basic yeast “chassis” to build a new genetic architecture. The redesigned genetic sequence gave rise to a variant of...