In California, a research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley has engineered bacteria to produce new-to-nature carbon products that could provide a powerful route to sustainable biochemicals. The advance – which was recently announced in the journal Nature – uses bacteria to combine natural enzymatic reactions with a new-to-nature […]
In Canada, ERS Genomics announced that its first Canadian patent, CA 2872241, with broad claims to compositions and methods of using CRISPR/Cas9 in humans, animals, plants, and microbes has been granted to the CVC group. CVC stands for University of California, University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier and is the acronym used to describe the owners […]
In California, bacterium named Moorella thermoacetica won’t work for free. But UC Berkeley researchers have figured out it has an appetite for gold. And in exchange for this special treat, the bacterium has revealed a more efficient path to producing solar fuels through artificial photosynthesis. By attaching light-absorbing nanoparticles made of cadmium sulfide (CdS) to […]
In California, photosynthesis provides energy for the vast majority of life on Earth. But chlorophyll, the green pigment that plants use to harvest sunlight, is relatively inefficient. To enable humans to capture more of the sun’s energy than natural photosynthesis can, scientists have taught bacteria to cover themselves in tiny, highly efficient solar panels to […]
In California, the state has not taken full advantage of opportunities to increase its in-state production of biofuel, despite state policies that encourage biofuel consumption, according to a report by the Climate Change and Business Research Initiative at the UCLA and UC Berkeley law schools. Coming on the heels of new Environmental Protection Agency rules […]
In California, researchers from UC Berkeley reviewed a collection of recent literature that mapped bioenergy potential on marginal lands at varying scales, and found that there is no common working definition of marginal land across all of these works. Specifically, they found considerable differences in mapped results that are driven by dissimilarities in definitions, model […]
In California, The Energy Biosciences Institute, a partnership between UC Berkeley and BP, has been awarded its first intellectual property patent entitled “Methods and compositions for improving sugar transport, mixed sugar fermentation, and production of biofuels”. The research team includes UC Berkeley faculty, University of Illinois faculty, graduate and postgraduate students, and BP scientists working […]
“Pack Up Your (renewable fuel) Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag”, say Berkeley researchers, who transform an old WWI-era process into a route to renewable diesel. If the Digest possessed a magic wand and could change just one thing about the production of biofuels in the United States – it would be to give the […]
In California, top researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have formed the UC Berkeley Synthetic Biology Institute to advance efforts to engineer cells and biological systems in ways that promise to transform technology in health and medicine, energy, the environment, new materials, and a host of other critical arenas. The institute is launching collaborative […]
