Energy density of petroleum-based fuels and advanced biofuels. Shown is the heating value of petroleum-based fuels (black) and advanced biofuels (green) as a function of density. Pinene dimers (red) have density and heating value similar to that of JP-10. Credit: ACS, Sarria et al. Click to enlarge. Recent progress in... Read more →

A Berkeley Lab-led team is working to re-engineer an enzyme for the efficient conversion of methane to liquid hydrocarbon transportation fuels. The project was awarded $3.5 million by the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) as part of its REMOTE (Reducing Emissions using Methanotrophic Organisms for Transportation Energy) program.... Read more →

During his keynote and subsequent question-and-answer session at the BIO Pacific Rim Summit on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy in San Diego this week, Dr. Craig Venter, Founder, Chairman, and CEO, J. Craig Venter Institute and Founder and CEO, Synthetic Genomics, Inc. (SGI) tangentially provided a brief update on the status... Read more →

Researchers at UCLA led by Dr. James Liao have created a new synthetic metabolic pathway for breaking down glucose that could lead to a 50% increase in the production of biofuels. The new pathway is intended to replace the natural metabolic pathway known as glycolysis, a series of chemical reactions... Read more →

On 19 September, the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) awarded $34 million to 15 projects to find advanced biocatalyst technologies that can convert natural gas to liquid fuel for transportation. (Earlier post.) The largest award in the technical area of High-Efficiency Biological Methane Activation in the new program, (Reducing Emissions... Read more →

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) of the US Department of Defense has awarded Dr. Fuzhong Zhang, assistant professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) a Young Faculty Award worth $860,000 to engineer the bacterium Escherichia coli to produce gasoline-range molecules. Zhang’s... Read more →

Researchers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) (Germany), with colleagues from the MPI (Max Planck Institute) Mülheim and Université Grenoble, have discovered an efficient process for hydrogen biocatalysis. They developed semi-synthetic hydrogenases—hydrogen-generating enzymes—by adding the protein’s biological precursor to a chemically synthesized inactive iron complex. From these two components, the biological... Read more →

The UK is launching a new £10-million (US$15-million) Innovation and Knowledge Centre (IKC) to translate the emerging field of synthetic biology into application and provide a bridge between academia and industry. The IKC, to be called SynbiCITE, will be based at Imperial College London and led by Professor Richard Kitney... Read more →

Hydrocarbons produced by cells expressing the synthetic alkane pathway (CEDDEC) or the cyanobacterial alkane pathway (AR and AD from N. punctiforme) without modifications to the fatty acid pool. n = 6 biological replicates; error bars represent SE of mean. Howard et al. Click to enlarge. A team from the University... Read more →

The US Department of Energy announced more than $10 million in funding to five new projects that will develop new synthetic biological and chemical techniques to convert biomass into advanced biofuels and bioproducts such as plastics and chemical intermediates. Two of these projects will develop cost-effective ways to produce intermediates... Read more →

Proterro engineered cyanobacteria for continuous high-yield production of sucrose, which can then be used in the production of biofuels and biochemicals. Source: Proterro. Click to enlarge. Proterro, Inc.—the only company making sugar instead of extracting it from crops—has closed on a $3.5-million financing round led by current investor Braemar Energy... Read more →

Metabolic pathway construction for direct microbial synthesis of pentanol from glucose or glycerol. The pentanol biosynthetic pathway consists of three modules, each of which was validated separately and then assembled together. Tseng and Prather 2012. Click to enlarge. Researchers at MIT have adapted the butanol pathway for the synthesis of... Read more →

Calysta is using its proprietary BioGTL biological gas-to-liquids platform to convert natural gas to liquid hydrocarbons. Click to enlarge. Start-up Calysta Energy plans to use methane as a feedstock for engineered organisms to produce liquid hydrocarbon fuels and high value chemicals that are cost-effective, scalable and reduce environmental impact. Current... Read more →

Renewable fuels and chemicals company Amyris, Inc. has been awarded a contract from the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under its Living Foundries program solicitation (earlier post) to develop tools that can expand the scope of Amyris's industrial synthetic biology technology platform across various biological platforms... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is soliciting (DE-FOA-0000719) research projects for up approximately $12 million in awards in FY 2012 for work on biosynthetic pathways for advanced biofuels to demonstrate transformational, not incremental, improvements in yield and productivity. Synthetic biology technologies hold promise for addressing critical barriers in the... Read more →

The White House today released a national Bioeconomy Blueprint, a comprehensive approach to harnessing innovations in biological research to address national challenges in health, food, energy, and the environment. In coordination with the Blueprint’s release, Federal officials also announced a number of new commitments to help achieve the Blueprint’s goals.... Read more →

Characterization of N. gaditana lipid content. (a) Lipid droplets (green) in cells during logarithmic growth. (b) Lipid droplets in cells during stationary phase. (c) GC-FID chromatogram showing a typical N. gaditana fatty acid profile. Source: Radakovits et al., Supplementary material. Click to enlarge. With the goal of transforming a natively... Read more →

An integrated electromicrobial process to convert CO2 to higher alcohols. Electricity powered the electrochemical CO2 reduction on the cathode to produce formate, which is converted to isobutanol and 3MB by the engineered R. eutropha. Li et al. Click to enlarge. Researchers at UCLA have demonstrated a method for converting carbon... Read more →

Researchers with the US Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have developed a new synthetic system and approach that can significantly boost the engineered microbial production of renewable fuels or chemicals. This new technique—dubbed a dynamic sensor-regulator system (DSRS)—uses a transcription factor that senses key intermediates and dynamically... Read more →

Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have engineered Escherichia coli bacteria to overproduce saturated and monounsaturated aliphatic methyl ketones in the C11 to C15 (diesel) range from glucose. In subsequent tests, these methyl ketones yielded high cetane numbers, making them promising candidates for the... Read more →

Design-driven engineering process. Coarse-grained mechanistic modeling identifies design parameters to produce targeted device outputs. Components meeting the design specifications are then engineered and individually characterized. Transcripts are designed with kinetic RNA folding simulations, enabling the assembly of component parts into physical devices. Finally, device functions predicted from the parameter inputs... Read more →

In an open access paper published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, scientists at Sapphire Energy report on a hybrid yeast-bacteria methodology for cloning and modifying the chloroplast genome from the green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, and then inserting it into algae. The chloroplast—the site of photosynthesis—is responsible for producing organic... Read more →

Global Bioenergies S.A. and LanzaTech Ltd, two industrial biology companies, have begun a feasibility study to examine whether Global Bioenergies’ artificial isobutene pathway (earlier post), can be functionally transferred into LanzaTech’s carbon monoxide-using organism (earlier post). Isobutene is a widely used intermediate chemical used for the production of fuel additives,... Read more →

Synthetic Genomics Inc. (SGI) and Plenus, S.A. de C.V., a Mexico-based investing and management company, are forming a new agricultural biotechnology company, Agradis. Agradis will focus on developing and commercializing products to sustainably improve crop production efficiency using genomics and plant breeding. Agradis also announced the closing of a $20-million... Read more →

Chemical structures of fuels. Bisabolane (2); Hexadecane (3), a representative molecule for diesel; farnesane (4); and methyl palmiate (5), a representative molecule for fatty acid methyl esters. Source: Peralta-Yahya et al. Click to enlarge. A team from the US Department of Energy (DOE) Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) has identified a... Read more →

Comparison of n-alcohols synthesis via the fatty acid biosynthesis pathway (top) and the engineered reversal of the β-oxidation cycle (bottom). Dellomonaco et al. Click to enlarge. Rice University engineering researchers have developed a new method for rapidly converting glucose into biofuels and renewable petrochemical substitutes by reversing the ubiquitous β-oxidation... Read more →

Joule Unlimited Technologies, a bioengineering startup leveraging highly engineered photosynthetic organisms to catalyze the conversion of sunlight and CO2 to fuels and chemicals, has been awarded its first two US patents covering its fundamental method for producing ethanol at volumes and efficiencies surpassing biomass-dependent processes. Joule is developing pathways and... Read more →

An international team of researchers led by George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, in collaboration with Joe Jacobson, an associate professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has developed genome engineering technologies that are capable of fundamentally re-engineering genomes from the nucleotide to... Read more →

Conceptual sketch of future metabolomics challenges and opportunities from May 2010 NSF-JST workshop on metabolomics. Click to enlarge. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) and Japan Science and Technology Agency (NSF-JST) have launched a joint program, Metabolomics for a Low Carbon Society (METABOLOMICS), and are soliciting research projects. The goal... Read more →

The future of engineered biocatalysts. Pathways, enzymes, and genetic controls are designed from characteristics of parts. The chromosomes encoding those elements are synthesized and incorporated into a ghost envelope to obtain the new catalyst. The design of the engineered catalyst is influenced by the desired product and the production process.... Read more →

Amyris reprograms yeast to produce targeted molecules via fermentation. One possible products, farnesene, can be a diesel precursor. Source: Amyris. Click to enlarge. Amyris, Inc. has entered into a contract manufacturing agreement with Tate & Lyle Ingredients Americas, Inc., an affiliate of Tate & Lyle PLC. Under this arrangement, Tate... Read more →

Bio Architecture Lab (BAL), a synthetic biology and enzyme design company focused on the production of biofuels and biochemicals from macroalgae (seaweed), and Statoil, one of the world’s largest offshore oil and gas producers, have formed wide-ranging strategic partnership for the production of ethanol derived from macroalgae grown off the... Read more →

Joule Unlimited, Inc., has been awarded a US patent covering its conversion of sunlight and waste carbon dioxide directly into liquid hydrocarbons that are fungible with conventional diesel fuel. Joule is the first to achieve and patent a direct, single-step, continuous process for the production of hydrocarbon fuels requiring no... Read more →

The US National Science Foundation has awarded a one-year, $200,000 RAPID Response grant to synthetic biology company Modular Genetics, Inc. and scientists and engineers at Columbia University, Iowa State University (ISU) and the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center to support work on production and testing of bio-dispersants that can replace... Read more →

The new greenhouse. Click to enlarge. ExxonMobil and Synthetic Genomics (SGI) have opened a new greenhouse facility at SGI headquarters in La Jolla, CA enabling the next level of research and testing in their algae biofuels program announced last July. (Earlier post.) The new facility, opened at a ceremony today... Read more →

Amyris’ technology platform modifies microorganisms to leverage an isoprenoid biosynthetic pathway to produce a large variety of product molecules from sugar. Source: Amyris. Click to enlarge. Amyris, Inc. has entered into an off-take agreement with Shell for the supply of Amyris No Compromise diesel. The parties have agreed to the... Read more →

Amyris engineers microbes to convert sugar to hydrocarbon fuels. Micrograph of fermentation fluids from production of Amyris Renewable Diesel (Nov 2007). Source: Amyris. Click to enlarge. France-based Total, a major international oil and gas company, and synthetic biology company Amyris Inc., have entered into a strategic partnership encompassing Total’s investment... Read more →

LS9, a synthetic biology company developing fermentation-derived drop-in renewable fuels and chemicals (earlier post), has won a 2010 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award for its “Renewable Petroleum” technology that converts sustainable, plant-based materials into low-carbon fuels and chemicals. LS9 modifies the ACP pathway in bacteria to produce renewable hydrocarbon fuels... Read more →

Self-replicating synthetic bacteria (JCVI-syn1.0 isolate) shown in electron micrographs using two different methods. Source: Gibson et al. Click to enlarge. Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit genomic research organization, have successfully constructed the first self-replicating, synthetic bacterial cell. The team synthesized the 1.08 million base pair... Read more →

The new Renewable Petroleum Facility. Click to enlarge. LS9, a synthetic biology company developing fermentation-derived drop-in renewable fuels and chemicals (earlier post), has acquired an existing production facility in Okeechobee, Florida. LS9 will retrofit the facility to accommodate its proprietary one-step fermentation process. The new “Renewable Petroleum Facility” (RPF) is... Read more →

The University of Queensland, Australia (UQ) and US-based Amyris Biotechnologies Inc., a synthetic biology company focused on developing renewable hydrocarbon biofuels (earlier post), are partnering to explore potential business opportunities for the conversion of sugarcane into renewable jet fuel. The agreement, which was signed at the San Francisco offices of... Read more →

Electron micrograph shows rod-shaped E. coli secreting oil droplets containing biodiesel fuel, along with fatty acids and alcohol. (Image by Jonathan Remis, JBEI) Click to enlarge. A collaboration led by researchers with the US Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) has developed a microbe that can produce an advanced... Read more →

Top: Lignin is normally synthesized from three monolignols. The hydroxyl groups (OH), shown in red, must remain unmodified for these precursors to link up. Bottom: The new enzyme (green structure) can methylate the hydroxyl group, potentially interfering with lignin biosynthesis. Click to enlarge. Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s... Read more →

Amyris Biotechnologies, Inc. intends to acquire a 40% stake in the Boa Vista mill, an ethanol-producing mill owned and operated by the São Martinho Group, one of the largest and most efficient sugar and ethanol producers in Brazil. The parties will work together to convert this mill to produce Amyris... Read more →

Amyris engineers microbes to convert sugar to hydrocarbon fuels. Micrograph of fermentation fluids from production of Amyris Renewable Diesel (Nov 2007). Source: Amyris. Click to enlarge. Embraer, General Electric, and Amyris Biotechnologies, a synthetic biology company focused on developing renewable hydrocarbon biofuels (earlier post) signed a Memorandum of Understanding to... Read more →

LS9 modifies the ACP pathway in bacteria to produce renewable hydrocarbon fuels and chemicals with optimized properties. Source: LS9. Click to enlarge. LS9 Company, a synthetic biology company producing renewable fuels and chemicals directly by fermentation, has successfully completed a $25 million round of funding. Participating investors included CTTV Investments... Read more →

Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) report a major advance in synthetic biology. In a paper published online 20 August in the journal Science, they describe new methods with which the entire bacterial genome from Mycoplasma mycoides was cloned in a yeast cell by adding yeast centromeric plasmid... Read more →

MAGE enables the rapid and continuous generation of sequence diversity at many targeted chromosomal locations across a large population of cells through the repeated introduction of synthetic DNA. Wang et al., Nature. Click to enlarge. A new cell programming method called Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering (MAGE) promises to give biotechnology,... Read more →

ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company (EMRE) has launched what it calls a “significant” new program to research and develop advanced biofuels from photosynthetic algae that are compatible with today’s gasoline and diesel fuels. As part of the program, ExxonMobil has formed a strategic research and development alliance with Synthetic Genomics... Read more →

Portions of three natural fungal cellulase enzymes that have been recombined to produce a synthetic, thermostable cellulase are denoted by blue, green and red coloring. The recombined cellulase enzyme modeled here functions at higher temperatures than any of the three parents. Source: Caltech. Click to enlarge. Researchers at the California... Read more →